tomenzgg comments on Thso whats

[–] tomenzgg@midwest.social 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

What I've noticed is that most poor comma placement is because people forgot the leading one; "I like how someone , who is making fun of another’s literacy, did so with poor grammar."

It's astoundingly common, including (especially) amongst publications.

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[–] dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

I'm not sure I buy that. It's not exactly a non-restrictive phrase in this case because the sentence "I like how someone did so with poor grammar." does not seem like the original intent. You can shoehorn that argument I suppose, but it certainly just looks more like an errant comma.

If I were to guess, I think OP thought they had an adverbial phrase (I think that's the right term) that needed to be set apart with a comma, but, in actual fact, it both was not and did not.

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[–] tomenzgg@midwest.social 2 points 3 months ago

(granted, you did mention that you could shoehorn this but) I don't think a fragment of any sentence needs to have the sentence make sense if you remove the fragment; we jam fragments that are required to understand a sentence into all sorts of locations of sentences, all the time.

The honest answer is that we don't really have any hard rules about comma usage (as you point out, the sentence would work just as well without any commas), broadly, so people kind of just go vibes-based, most of the time.

I feel like "did so with poor grammar" very obviously doesn't feel like a tack on to a sentence (like, starting with a verb wouldn't make sense) so I'm inclined to disagree but I'm anal about comma placement so maybe the average person would.

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