Thursday, May 18, 2017

grammar - Comma separating subordinating clauses

I'm a software developer and occasionally write user documentation and project proposals for my boss. I've been running into a punctuation problem recently that I've been unable to solve. I have a sentence in the form





SUBORDINATING CLAUSE + "and" + SUBORDINATING CLAUSE, MAIN CLAUSE.




For example:




If Jack and Jill were going up a hill and Bob were simultaneously driving down the hill, Bob would run over Jill.





I've been rather confused whether there should be a comma before the and. I realize the two subordinating clauses actually share the if, but a part of me still wants to insert a comma like one would do if the and separated two main clauses. Is there any standard (American) punctuation rule that applies in this sort of corner-case? I realize I could rewrite the sentence in a way to avoid this problem, but I'd really like to know what the generally accepted (American) standard for this is.

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