Commas can be overdone, especially when they are scattered through prose haphazardly, like raisins in muesli. On the other hand, they can remove ambiguity or simply act as a breathing post for a reader plodding through a long sentence.
In this excerpt from an article in the
Australian Financial Review on 25 November, for example, a comma after companies would remove the faint suggestion that the agreements were made to bolster the corporate regulator's case, which is not what the writer intended:
In this excerpt from Paul Kelly's article in the
Australian on 24th November, on the other hand, a comma would not alter the reader's perception of meaning. However, if one were inserted before "with", it would, in my view make the sentence a lot easier to follow:
In this last case, however, also from Kelly's article, a comma is absolutely necessary before "with", if you do not want "rhetoric and policies geared to its southeastern base" to be linked to "nation" rather than to "Labor":
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