I was thinking a bit more about this, and so far what you have will only work for single word lists: "apples, oranges and pears", but you won't find: "five apples, three oranges and two pears". And I might suggest that it is the more complicated list that is more important one if additional clarity is your goal.
For a more comprehensive match I think you are going to need something like:
This will almost certainly find more than you want, probably a lot of false positives, but you are less likely to miss important instances. The quotes are there to stop the search going over quote boundaries - I included plain as well as open/close, you probably can't exclude an apostrophe (because you "can't"
). The full stop is there to stop it at the end of a sentence (obviously), and the semi-colon because it should represent a superior phrase boundary.
You may be able to limit the number of false positives by limiting the amount of text permitted between the comma and the " and":
Code:
\>,[^,."“”]{1,30} and
But of course this risks missing some of the worst offenders.
ETA: I specified the quotes because of what I saw when testing on my fiction writing, in your non-fiction it maybe that you would be better off without the quotes in the exclude list - in case your lists include quoted items.