BG Grammar Police: Unnecessary, Commas

[Qalbert]

comma's

[Apelila]

And caught in one. Oh well.

[EternityEnd]

Using comma's to present a spoken break in a sentence is the first stop at the sloppy writing train station. I'm forgiving of technical documents full of jargon that use this affect, the example you have provided is not something that falls within that category.

Commas. Effect. Insert "but" after comma.

It's okay, though.

[Greatguardian]

The first "specific" makes the sentence sound redundant without a pause when spoken, which is why he put the comma in there. It is redundancy, because you're already looking at specified changes if you're looking at changes made by a specific user. Really what they want to say is, "You can select some of the changes made by a specific user and look only at them."

This almost has to be analogous to the meaning, is more "specific" (somewhat ironically), and avoids the problem:

Eh, it doesn't come off as redundant to me if only because this is still a piece of software we're talking about. It's bad form in the CS world to take any sort of functionality for . When writing software manuals, I find it's generally better practice to be too specific than risk being unclear about the precise functionality of the software.

There are a half dozen grammatically correct ways to phrase the sentence, but only one of them is going to convey what it is the software actually does most correctly. I don't know what the software does, though, so I can only go off of how the author originally chose to phrase the sentence.

[The Stig]

Ever since I read the whole thread on Friday, I can't help but be extremely self conscious on where I use commas for my work e-mails lol

Damn you all for making me feel so insecure

Using comma's to present a spoken break in a sentence is the first stop at the sloppy writing train station. I'm forgiving of technical documents full of jargon that use this affect, the example you have provided is not something that falls within that category.

But when you read out a small list of items (in sentence form) you need to use commas to indicate some sort of pause. Does that fall into your sloppy writing category?