The Oxford Comma

Are you all going to shout at me now?

I won"t dear !!

Not shouting at anyone. I don't have the energy! Commas used instead of full stops between what are clearly separate sentences are anathema to me.

So few people use a semi-colon these days.

janeainsworth Sorry if I was in bossy mode. It happens!

I use semi-colons. It's a very useful punctuation mark. I would love to know if any of my former students still make use of it. Probably none!

I love semi-colons <<< that's me when i get to use one.

I use them gratuitously! ;;;;;;;;;;;

Just wondering what an inadequate comma is.

At e end of the day is it really that important ??
Just saying , HONEYS !!

The other grammatical fact that was drummed into to me was never start a sentence with and or but. I still feel "guilty" when I do that!!

Yes, I know that feeling, Grandmanorm ! But I do it all the same!

And I end some sentences with 'of.' Rebel!

My blood runs cold!

I hope you get better soon.

And so do I!

I can't seem to stop using exclamation marks!! At least every other sentence uses one! Is that bad?

That's been happening to me, too!!

ffinnochio it is as anno says: a comma between two quite separate sentences, where either a full stop or a semi-colon should be. Yes, it matters, because it can change the sense.
I had a fierce English teacher (i.e. teacher of English) at school in Scotland who made us REWRITE an essay if we used 'so' as a conjunction, or the verb 'to get'. I can't do it to this day, 50 years later.

Thought it was a variety/new species of butterfly. Got quite excited just then.

I always knew that a preposition was a bad thing to end a sentence with.

The standard of grammar up with which I will not put.

Oscar Wilde reckoned that once, when struggling to compose a poem, he spent the whole morning deciding to take a comma out and the whole afternoon deciding to put it back in again.

On the other hand, George Orwell thought that grammar and punctuation didn't matter all that much so long as what you wrote was lucid.

I think good punctuation can improve lucidity, and bad punctuation can make things harder to understand, or make them more open to amibguity. Ambiguity isn't always a bad thing of course; I'm thinking of literary appreciation exercises that depended at least in part on the connotations of the words used.

Damming with faint praise?