: Re: Should I be using commas to suggest/enforce cadence? I always think of commas as indicating pauses in speech, and vice versa. So I was surprised the other day when I saw somebody's typed-out

@Cofer669

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In dialogues (or monologues, or any transcriptions), commas are used for two reasons:

1- Logical separators as in formal grammar and;

2- to indicate oral pauses whether grammatically correct or not. Dashes (–) and ellipses (…) can also be used this way, usually at at a line's end.

So, I'd say that if you are reciting the pledge itself as content then the formal -comma light- version should be used. That's true for all text everywhere because commas translate to pauses in speech, not vice versa.

The version where pauses are captured with commas could be used in dialogues and situations where you want the text to convey how the phrase/sentence/...etc was meant to be said. This could be called 'conversation mode' as the reader translates commas to pauses then translates the whole text back with proper 'grammatical commas.'

* One more thing, punctuation is always included 'as is' when quoting text.

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