this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Unless the authorial intent is to read it in your head as performed by a William Shatner impersonator they are outright wrong. That predicate has been split so finely it's outright minced.
Here's a fun trick for sentence structure that helps with punctuation: replace clauses with single words and see if the sentence still looks good:
"Just because you are right, does not mean, I am wrong."
"This, means, that. Mr. Spock."
Mmmminced.
In yet another display of irony, you potentially demonstrated correct use in dialogue to indicate pauses in the speaker's speech.
No, I didn't. I don't know who teaches people that commas represent small pauses in speech, but they're not helping.
That's what the ellipsis is for. If you want to correctly do fake Shatner you do
"This... means... that, Mr. Spock".
That's where the comma should go, by the way. You use it to separate the vocative. I had to use a period in the incorrect sentence above just to avoid the redundancy with the incorrect ones splitting the verb from the subject and the object.
As long as the intended reading was conveyed, what's the problem?
Using commas as pauses in speech gets the intent across, even if it isn't the "correct" punctuation. That's why people keep doing it. People read your examples of Shatnerisms with commas and think its fine, and if enough people think it's fine then it actually is. Rules aren't real.
The OP is garbage, though. It comes across as stuttery and, like you said, minced.
I mean, yeah...
...that's why when you see it done wrong you call it out. So the wrong way to do it doesn't become the new normal and you have to spend the rest of your life seeing people write "your an idiot".
If it's the new normal then, by definition, it's not wrong.
It's just whining about aesthetics at that point.
English professors.
The ellipses indicate longer pauses.
You really need to stop embarrassing yourself, man, and figure out the difference between incorrect usage and usage you don't like.
No, they don't. The difference between commas and ellipses is not at the length of the pause. Commas don't necessarily correlate to a pause at all in many cases, and separating the verb from the subject with a comma is straight-up wrong. I hate to link to sources of authority in stuff like this because it's patronizing as hell, but I promise you can look this up.
I know somebody told you that's it's about conveying speech pauses, and I'm sorry you had to find out in the middle of an Internet argument where you tried to show up a pedant, so now you're entrenched and will refuse to back down for all eternity, but... yeah, no, that sentence is wrong.