it's perfectly readable to me, I just read any comma as a short pause. When saying that out loud, you would make a short pause. It's read the same whether there's an ellipsis, semicolon, hyphen, or whatever.
Also, no, it isn't semantically indistinguishable from that latter sentence, what? You literally know this, you said that that's "obviously not what is meant". The order of the sentences, and the pause there, is what conveys semantic information, not whether that pause is a comma or not.
> It's read the same whether there's an ellipsis, semicolon, hyphen, or whatever.
So why do you think we have all of those different punctuation marks instead of just one?
I understood what was meant by reading carefully and guessing. If you punctuate more ‘correctly’ (and I’m aware that’s a controversial and triggering suggestion for some), readers don’t have to be careful or guess what you mean — it just flows.
You may think this stuff is surprising because you’ve never noticed it before, but if you look you’ll find that it matters to editors everywhere. If this were to be published, it’d be corrected immediately.
Yes, there are age-old debates between descriptive and prescriptive grammarians. But in my book, “pause = comma” is a crude and inaccurate tool, and “the commas didn’t stop you from figuring out what I meant” is the lowest possible bar.
There are active prescriptive English grammarians? How many, relative to descriptivists? Serious question, I honestly don’t know. Maybe I’m biased, but I thought the framing that English language rules are de-facto historically descriptive and not prescriptive was by far the dominant view among language experts. If there are prescriptivists, they seem to be losing, since English has changed a lot. When I try to dig into any language question, whether it’s punctuation history or word etymology or whatever, the answers by professional linguists always seem to be along the lines of, ‘well some people have opinions, but there’s a wide variety of usage throughout history, c’est la vie’.
I don’t know what you mean about a low bar. Is that a bad thing? What do you want to have happen, either here or with commas in general?
I’m not a prescriptivist either. Language usage changes over time, and that’s fine. And my personal conventions for usage can be different than yours.
The more interesting (to me) question is whether spoken English and written English share the same conventions. I think it’s abundantly clear that in most languages, they are divergent, to the point that some spoken languages have multiple written forms, each with their own ruleset for handling topics like formality or gender.
So to me, saying “gonna” all day long doesn’t automatically transfer to writing, where most people write “going to.” Same with commas—the written conventions are not, as far as I’m concerned, about mimicking speech pauses. If that rule works for you, great. It doesn’t for me, and I fall back to patterns that are drawn from reading the written word.
For low bar, I didn’t mean to sound like I was taking a dig. What I meant was that a written sentence which isn’t comprehensible isn’t functional. Once you get past functional, there’s a world of expression and nuance that come from different writing styles.
> And my personal conventions for usage can be different than yours.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. But what bothers me (enough to eventually write a comment) is not that others’ conventions differ — it’s that they don't have conventions at all. Words are just strewn all over the page with abandon and anyone who questions it is told to piss off, usually via a long counter-rant laced with moral superiority and mentions of the standard buzzword ‘prescriptivism’. I suspect it’s because it’s deeply insulting and humiliating to be told you’re ignorant about something so seemingly basic, and almost everyone is ignorant when it comes to effective punctuation.
> If that rule works for you, great.
You give people too much credit. It’s not that they’ve tried several styles and eventually landed on this one as a matter of personal taste. They’ve never even noticed the difference.
Again: that there are ‘no formal rules’ for language use does not imply there’s zero value in caring how language is used and trying to keep it consistent and logical.
it's perfectly readable to me, I just read any comma as a short pause. When saying that out loud, you would make a short pause. It's read the same whether there's an ellipsis, semicolon, hyphen, or whatever.
Also, no, it isn't semantically indistinguishable from that latter sentence, what? You literally know this, you said that that's "obviously not what is meant". The order of the sentences, and the pause there, is what conveys semantic information, not whether that pause is a comma or not.