Mandatory, which is to say mindless, use of the Oxford comma also litters writing with clutter. Each needless comma is an excrescence. In the phrase, “Faith, hope and love remain,” appending a comma after “hope” would not clarify anything, but it would waste space and interrupt the flow of a beautiful passage.

In brief, the Oxford comma is often superfluous and a crutch for bad writing, yet it has many partisans who want to force it on everyone. Why?

I doubt that many advocates for a mandatory Oxford comma are confused over the parentage of the hypothetical person who expressed gratitude to Batman and Superman. Rather, they are irate at grading another what-I-did-this-summer essay that includes something like, “Then I went swimming at the lake with my brothers, Bill and Ted.” The ambiguity (Are Bill and Ted the student’s brothers or additional members of the party?) annoys the teacher reading about the adventure.

Many editors, lawyers and corporate types may have similar irritation when dealing with subordinates who cannot write clearly. For them, as for the teacher above, requiring the Oxford comma is a means to establish basic standards for written precision. However, mandating the Oxford comma also makes bad writing compulsory. Specific fields, such as legal writing, might find standardization more important than elegance, but they are the exception.