word usage - "Applicable to you" or "Applicable for you" - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
Please show me example sentences with applicable.
grammar - "As Applicable" Concluding a Sentence - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
Is a Colon Applicable in This Sentence? Help Me Settle My Debate, please.
The overwhelming usage is applicable to. The google reports 67.5M hits for applicable to and 340K hits for applicable for. (Admittedly this not an exact gauge.) I find a similar disparity on the Ngram viewer. Applicable means relevant or appropriate, and when the subject under discussion applies directly to the person addressed, then applicable to is the phrasing of choice. Sometimes, however, the subject under discussion is relevant to the situation of the person addressed but not to person himself or herself. In that case, applicable for may be used. Here's an instance from Vicki Lansky's Divorce Book for Parents:
One rule of thumb is 25 percent of the noncustodial's take-home pay at the time of your divorce will go to child support. But only a professional can tell you whether this will be applicable for you.
So, generally speaking divorced parents who aren't living with their children (noncustodials) can expect to pay one-quarter of their salary to support their children. But both custodial and noncustodial parents may be reading the book, and the 25% rule isn't applicable directly to custodial parents, only to their noncustodial ex-spouses. So the author uses applicable for to include the situations of both types of divorced parents.
The phrase "applicable to" suggests the speaker suggesting something mildly as a third party, "applicable for " means the speaker emphasizing on something which was permissible to you by law or by ethics.
The comma isn’t so much a dangerous weapon as an easily blunted scalpel.
Whatever pointing practice you follow, mechanical or rhetorical, using too many commas tends to blur the significance of each. So while FumbleFingers is exactly correct in suggesting that a comma before as applicable marks the natural pause you take in speech before adding this qualification to what has gone before, its significance is confused by the presence of all those other commas which serve a different purpose.
I suggest instead that a more readable solution would be to mark this phrase with different points—it might be parentheses, it might be dashes—and that you place the parenthesis before the list, to avoid distressing your readers by implying that their applications will be defective if they fail to include the names of maiden aunts they don’t have:
In your application, please include (as applicable) your telephone number, cell phone number, e-mail address, names of maiden aunts, and a list of schools you have attended.
(And if it wuz me I’d do something to clarify the scope of that your, which at present gives the impression of including (your) names... and (your) list..., too. But once I start rewriting I find it hard to stop.)
What FumbleFingers and StoneyB said.
But there is also a grammatical reason for the comma, if you place the as applicable at the end of the sentence. You have provided a list of possible answers, the last of which is a list of schools. Without a comma to set off as applicable, the delimiting phrase might be misconstrued to apply only to the last item list rather than the list entire. While StoneyB's repositioning of the modifier is a more effective solution, the comma reduces the chance of confusion.