Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

A person posted:   

And a person replied:

The comma in the reply is wrong, normally, in print.

But the problem is that newsgroup and much other internet writing is
word-for-word what people would say in person.    Without the comma,
the end of the sentence is "the point to object".  This sounds like a
four-word phrase that means something, something the second poster was
trying to understand. and it takes quite a while for some people to
firgure out the real meaning of the sentence.   He was too busy to
object because he was trying to understand the point.

Asking people to rephrase things when they already spend too much time
in newsgroups is an unproductive idea.  And it's a bad idea because
the words they tend to use first are most likely to most closely mean
what the poster wants to say.   And because much net posting is in a
conversational style, as if spoken, people aren't going to want to
rewrite and aren't going to rewrite.

A comma in the reply makes the reader pause after point, and makes
clear that "the point to object" is not one phrase describing a
particular kind of point, for example.

Given all that, to whatever extent you accept it, does a comma in the
person's reply seem like a bad or a good idea?