Resolved: The Oxford comma should be mandatory.

I will now present my opening arguments. C1) DescriptivismThe premise used in this argument is that if a language feature is used extensively in formal written communication, then it can be used. The comma is an fundamental part of punctuation, which is an essential element of orthography, which in turn is an essential part of language. Language is not static; it is ever-changing, and resistance to linguistic change is a futile attempt, which we can see from the fact that words such as presidential, once regarded as unacceptable horrors, are now prevalent. The rules that govern it should be based on (or based off! ) descriptions of actual discourse. Thus to determine the validity of the Oxford comma, one needs to look no further than corpus statistics. According to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the string '[Noun], [Noun], and [Noun]' appears 2995 times in the corpus, while '[Noun], [Noun] and [Noun]' appears 3361 times. (Apologies for the small text; I had to retain parts of the results to prove that I did not tamper with the screenshots. )With Oxford comma: Without Oxford comma: In the British National Corpus, the results were even more overwhelming. There are 276 results with the Oxford comma, and 1540 without:With Oxford comma: Without Oxford comma: Thus in the eye of the descriptivist, the lack of an Oxford comma is valid, and there is no reason to make the use of the comma mandatory. C2) ProsodyThe premise used in this argument is that punctuation should be based on prosody. We have all been taught at an early age that a comma is a 'short pause', a full stop is a 'long pause', and a semicolon a 'medium pause'. While these rules of thumb may not be foolproof, they should serve as a general guide to the correspondence between punctuation and juncture, which, after all, is known as 'oral punctuation'. Therefore, rules of punctuation ought to be based on descriptions of juncture in actual oral discourse. I will use two samples. The first is the phrase Men, Women and Children in this video: (At 0:03)The second is the phrase hook, line and sinker from this video: (At 0:37)I have produced their sound waves using Audacity, and transcribed both phrases into IPA using narrow transcriptions and open juncture. I have tried to ensure that my IPA symbols match up with the corresponding parts in the sound waves. (The second syllable of children was intentionally left out as unnecesary. ) As we can see from these sound waves, the pauses between the first and second items are long, as indicated by the plus signs. The pauses between the second items and the word and are relatively short, indicated by the lack of a plus sign and, in the case of the second sample, the lack of a space. Furthermore, I have observed that the juncture boundary between line and and was extremely thin; one could go as far as to describe it as a resyllabification similar to the French liaison, for the coda of line sounded like the onset of and. Therefore, whereas a comma is called for before the penultimate item, there is no need to insert a comma between the penultimate item and and. C3) PracticalityThis argument is written under the premise that in the absence of evidence that one orthographic form is better than the other, the easier one should prevail. Firstly, the Oxford comma is not used in most languages other than English, which include French (3), Danish (4), Dutch (5) Finnish (6), German (7), Greek (8), Hebrew (9), Hungarian (10), Italian (11), Norwegian (12), Romanian (13), Russian (14), Spanish (15), Swedish (16) and of course Chinese (17). Second-language learners whose native languages are these languages will find it useful to omit the Oxford comma unless necessary. Moreover, it is not used in English itself when the list has only two items: black and white, trial and error. Thus the Oxford comma will cause confusion in learners. C4) Readability'There are certain places where for the sake of clarity and good form the presence of a comma is obligatory, but on the other hand a too liberal use of this form of punctuation tends to slow up the pace of the reading matter and to create confusion and hesitancy in the mind of the reader. ' This was written in the 1937 New York Times style guide and still rings true (1), and is supported by other publications like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. (2) As a comma indicates a pause, the comma will incite in the reader a moment of hesitancy, slowing down the pace of reading. As the additional pause is not present in speech (as shown in C1), this will further confuse the reader. Thus a comma is, in situations where it does not induce ambiguity, needless clutter. Sources(1) . http://mentalfloss.com...(2) . http://www.businessinsider.com...(3) . http://www.la-ponctuation.com...(4) . http://dsn.dk... (5) . http://taaladvies.net...(6) . http://www.cs.tut.fi...(7) . http://rechtschreibrat.ids-mannheim.de...(8) . http://publications.europa.eu...(9) . http://www.ant.co.il...(10) . http://helyesiras.mta.hu...(11) . http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it...(12) . http://www.sprakrad.no...(13) . https://diacritica.wordpress.com...(14) . http://www.gramota.ru...(15) . http://buscon.rae.es...(16) . http://www.regeringen.se...(17) . http://www.pep.com.cn... See example 2.4Note: 4-16 cited by Wikipedia.