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That book club meeting where we fought for 40 minutes about a single comma
Last week our group spent almost an hour arguing whether the line 'she ate slowly, carefully and with intention' was better with or without the Oxford comma. Three people almost quit the club over it. Has anyone else had a debate erupt over something this small in your group?
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juliaa254d ago
Used to be totally fine skipping it but that debate actually CHANGED my mind. The comma makes the pause feel deliberate, like a built in hesitation before you get to 'with intention' which matters for that specific scene. Now I see both sides but I lean toward keeping it because it changes the whole rhythm of the sentence. Never thought a punctuation mark could cause that much drama but here we are. Actually glad we fought about it because now I think about commas way more carefully in my own writing.
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linda_clark4d ago
Forty minutes is still 20 short of our hour-long debate about the semicolon in chapter four.
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