The Question? “Should I use the Oxford comma?”

Controversy swirls around this question. First, the definition: The “Oxford comma,” sometimes called the “serial comma,” is the comma that appears just before the last “and” in a series.

If a company fails to address legal, accounting[,] and process issues properly, then the IPO might violate SEC regulations.

I don’t understand the controversy. Confusion might arise when we don’t use it; nothing is lost when we do use it. So why wouldn’t we use it? Consider this sentence:

John, Sylvia and I drafted the contract. 

This says that Sylvia and I drafted the contract, and that we are letting John know. (We compound the confusion, if we are writing to a client coincidentally named John.) If I mean that the three of us drafted the contract, then I should have written the sentence like this:

John, Sylvia[,] and I drafted the contract.

Another reason to use the Oxford comma: frequently, we write a series of items, one or more of which includes an “and,” so placing the comma before the last “and” informs the reader that the last item in the series is not part of the previous item.

SeaFloor offers a variety of offshore energy production support, including workover services, fluid and logistics, fishing and drilling[,] and leasing vessels. 

The last reason we use the Oxford comma is to avoid unintended humor:

The only people I listen to are my brothers, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

When we leave out the Oxford comma, we gain nothing, and we risk confusing our reader.