I'm embarrassed that I don't know this, but I've looked in every source I can think of and just can't find it. I frequently find sentences like this one:
The study consisted of observing teachers, assistants, and students, and developing recommendations for improving classroom management.
No, this is not a discussion about the serial comma. I use them. The question is should there be a comma after "students"? What follows is not an independent clause, so technically there should not be one. But I almost always see sentences like this written with the extra comma. I realize the easiest thing to do would be to recast the sentence, but I often don't have the luxury of reworking the wording.
So comma or no comma, and why?
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