re Comma Before Company Abbreviation?

["Mark L. Levinson" <nosnivel -at- netvision -dot- net -dot- il>]

As Bonnie and Dick have shown, when a sentence includes
the company name, a comma inside the name can cause
awkwardness.  Sometimes the last thing your sentence 
needs is another comma whether paired or unpaired.

- This manual is for Acme, Inc., workers, customers,
  and contractors.

- This manual is for Acme, Inc. workers, customers,
  and contractors.

In my experience for what it's worth, on the day that
the managers registered the company, they paid absolutely
no attention to whether they were registering it with a
comma or not.  Or if they did pay attention, they had no
good reason to go one way or the other.  ("You mean not
everybody has a comma?")

Now while it is true that the company's legal name either
includes or doesn't include the comma, most of our writing
is not legalese.  Theoretically you are free to identify
your company in any recognizable way, not necessarily only
by its legal name.  IBM's legal name isn't IBM, right?
So if your company has a comma and you can eliminate it
from your own writing without offending some officious 
martinet of the front office, I'd say eliminate it.


Mark L. Levinson
nosnivel -at- netvision -dot- net -dot- il

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