One of these years I should actually look up comma usage in American English.

[conuly]

I feel certain that we didn't actually cover this in school in any detail, but orthography really does have to be taught and I strongly suspect my natural instinct is to use commas a bit too much. I end up going back later and editing half of them out again.

Comments

[cimorene]

Yeah, I'm afraid the only places that have hard and fast rules are stylebooks and the occasional magazine. Of course that doesn't mean that there are no absolutely wrong or right uses according to standard American written English, but it does mean that a lot of instances are debatable.