I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Punctuation

On Friday, I asked my boss if the company had a standard on serial commas or sentence spacing.  She wasn't aware of such standards, but she encouraged me to check in the marketing style guide.  To no one's surprise, there was no mention of punctuation or spacing at all.  When I told her this, she asked me to make a decision that the company would go by, at least in North America.

While this may seem like an inconsequential decision to make, I felt really overwhelmed.  I felt strongly that one person should not be able to make that decision on their own.  When I've had a question on these things in the past, I've always had a company standard to refer to.  The standard isn't usually unique to the company -- the Chicago Manual of Style is often employed -- but it's still something that's been established.  Yet here I was, asked to make a decision that would affect all other documents from that time forward.

I went back through the marketing style guide and found a couple of examples where serial commas could be used and weren't, so I used that as my standard.  I also inferred that the standard was a single space between sentences, so that was another decision I didn't have to make.  I was certainly relieved.

I doubt anyone outside of a technical writer or a devoted editor would really care about something so small, but for me, it was a nerve wracking experience.