• verdigris@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Okay, yes, those are all valid places to put commas, good job – except for the one after “So”, which actually decreases the legibility. It would be better to surround “for example” with commas.

    However, none of them are grammatically necessary. The original comment is totally fine and can be parsed unambiguously as-is. I would support the colon insertion above any of your commas.

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Good point!

      Interesting, anywhere I can read about grammatically necessary vs. recommended yet unnecessary commas? (Perhaps on the first search result for that question heh)

      • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        This is a decent article, at least for the most part: I actually don’t like their examples for the “Preposition of Time” stuff at all, the versions with commas are just bad writing.

        But basically it just comes down to whether the sentence/clause can be parsed unambiguously without the commas. There is no syntactical difference between “I as a German asked…” and “I, as a German, asked…”. It’s entirely a style choice.