Subject: Are you perhaps an English teacher?
Author:
Posted on: 2010-01-22 23:09:00 UTC

You sound very formal.

Anyway. I've just looked at my online punctuation reference, it calls this comma a "joining comma". "It is used to join two complete sentences into a single sentence, and it must be followed by a suitable connecting word."

Thing is, that in school I learned that there never is a joining comma before "and". Granted, this was how to punctuate in Dutch, but I also remember English doesn't use joining commas as often as Dutch does (i.e. less connecting words get a joining comma).

I've looked up some additional references, and I will try to apply the joining comma more often in the future.

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