Re: For those who think punctuation matters: validation!

[Beth Agnew <beth -dot- agnew -at- senecac -dot- on -dot- ca>]

It's also a good reminder that NO ONE should "edit" any documentation 
that has a legal purpose, such as license agreements, terms of service 
agreements and other legal notices. They may indeed have had a copy 
editor who put the comma IN according to rules of good grammar and it 
wasn't noticed. Unfortunately, the legal beagles never share their 
intentions with the lowly editors, so there would be no way of knowing 
that adding a comma for readability was going to substantively change 
the intent of the contract.

It's not hard to envision an earnest techwriter giving a quick review to 
all text incorporated into a document and dropping in the comma to be 
helpful, not realizing the implications. No one would ever catch it. And 
I don't think there's one of us who hasn't wanted to give the plain 
language treatment to some hefty legalese.
Here's a case in point that reminds us to be not quite so zealous, at 
least with legal documents.