Thank you, Tom, that’s what I was thinking too. Since every clause can stand alone as a sentence, they should be set off by semi-colons, not commas. IMO. Which I’m sure eleventy-six people will now tell me is wrong. 
Oh, and one more vote for the serial / Oxford comma. It reduces confusion and adds clarity.
So going by Polycarp’s post, it would seem it’s better just to use the serial comma than not. There are situations where it’s better to use the comma. There are no situations where it’s better to use no comma. If you use it once, you must be consistent, so you can’t just call on it when necessary. May as well just use it at all times in that case.
I won’t say it’s wrong. It’s certainly not incorrect to set it off with semi-colons. You’re right–normally, something like “I came, I saw, I conquered” would be considered an unacceptable comma splice. But commas are usually permitted and preferred in this type of construction, which is called an asyndeton. Sentences which are composed of parallel, short independent clauses can be set off by commas. The sentence is seen as omitting the final conjunction (“I came, I saw, [and] I conquered”) for rhetoric effect rather than being three independent sentences.
But I don’t see anything wrong with “I came; I saw; I conquered.”
If you pause while reading, insert a comma. A comma indicates, among other things, a pause.
I cannot see the slightest justification for omitting any comma, and every reason to include all in both of these passages:
**I typed, I edited, and I proofread.
I came, I saw, I conquered.**
That’s an absolute rule with anything I write or edit.
Hear, hear.
Unless your parents really are Ayn Rand and God.
Eats leaves and shoots. :o
Actually, it’s “eats, shoots and leaves” for the title of the book and as the punchline of the joke that goes along with it.
There is only one person whose parents are Ayn Rand and God and that is Stephen Colbert.
I think the serial comma is essential and as electrons replace type the journalistic practice will fall by the wayside as archaic. My complaint is mostly with cadence- even in print I can’t help smooshing the penultimate and the ultimate item together if there is not a comma.
And for that I would like to thank my parents, my mom and my dad.
Sorry, Tom and Jodi, but you’ve spotted a specimen of the cottontail ‘Yahbut.’
As we all learned in elementary school, a construction of the sort “I saw my neighbor Fred, he was washing his dog” is a solecism called a comma splice and requires either a semicolon or division into two sentences.
However, language ‘rules’ are made to be broken where their ‘breaking’ has a desirable effect.
Very short, two- or three-word main clauses that appear to be distinct short sentences but are run together to produce an effect of crescendo or intensity, are even by the best writers properly joined by commas.
“I sob, I weep, I mourn, I cry in agony” has an immediacy and intensity to it that separating the elements by periods or semicolons would defeat.
Jodi, you may be familiar with the words to the hymn “I sought the Lord” (written by the prolific Anonymous). The third verse has a great example of this: “I find, I walk, I love, but oh, the whole of love is but my answer, Lord, to thee.” Again the sense of building momentum from the three short subject/verb clauses is lost if they are ‘properly’ separated.
Probably the oldest risque schoolboy joke in history:
In bello, veni, vidi, vici; in amore, vidi, vici, veni
–apocryphally attributed to G.J. Caesar
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Sure, but (or, if you prefer, yeah but) that sort of building intensity is not what you have with “I came; I saw; I conquered.” There is no building intensity; there is only three firm statements that each expresses a separate complete thought: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” It is the inevitability and matter-of-factness that makes the statement memorable, Rome as steamroller. So even if I were to grant that commas should set off poetic alternate clauses that all essentially express the same thought (which is the case in both your examples), I am not prepared to grant that they are as appropriate for “I came; I saw; I conquered.” Which is not to say they are incorrect, just that semi-colons are a better choice, IMO.
Well, my copyright guide didn’t say one way or the other, nor did my style guide, so I checked with my atlas, and it shrugged. 
Veni; vidi; punctum concedo.
There is a building intensity.
I came; I saw; I conquered. ≠ I came. I saw. I conquered.
There is less building intensity than “I came, I saw, I conquered,” but it is still there.
That’s not true. If you read the above-linked Wiki article, you’ll find that there are situations in which the serial comma does cause ambiguity that can be reduced by dropping it. The phrase, “I’d like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand and God,” without the serial comma makes a lot more sense than “I’d like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand, and God,” unless your mother really is Ayn Rand.
While consistency is important, clarity is more important; and once you’ve chosen a style, sticking to it provides consistency. I’m pretty comfortable with AP’s style guidelines:
Don’t use it for singular items, unless there are conjunctions within the items. Use it for complex series of phrases.
I don’t have any trouble understanding “red, white and blue.” It may look funny to those of us who are used to serial commas, but the lack of it doesn’t usually make the phrase difficult to comprehend at all. If it does, that’s when you need it.
I did that after jumping through a window, once. She did not tell me she was married.
I am extremely bothered by the lack of the Oxford comma. I always use it and find it jarring to read things which do not.
Funny, at work I read it as ‘coma’ and got home and was all, “why didn’t I notice this thread on commas?” Maybe I work too hard.
-Eben
I always use it. I insist on it being there, and it alarms me that it’s being used less in official publications. It just looks wrong to me. There are only very rare situations where using it will make a sentence wrong, while many more situations where not using it will make it read wrong. And it’s just the right thing to do.