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Pauses in speech often coincide with grammatically correct comma placement, but do not necessarily do so. Using speech pauses as a rule for comma placement is a fallacy. To quote Grammar Girl: "...
Answer
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:27:26Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23995 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
Chowzen
·
2019-12-08T05:27:26Z (almost 5 years ago)
Pauses in speech often coincide with grammatically correct comma placement, but do not _necessarily_ do so. Using speech pauses as a rule for comma placement is a fallacy. To quote [Grammar Girl](http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/where-do-i-use-commas): _"The 'put a comma everywhere you’d pause' idea is an unfortunately common myth."_ To address your first specific example, I believe that the word "okay" is actually the start of a new sentence, and I believe that the correct structure would be either: _“You look after each other. Okay, children?"_ or: _“You look after each other; okay, children?"_ (semicolons may link two sentences together to show that are related) For your second example, "I'll have a sparkling water, please, sir." is correct. The word "please" is non-restrictive, superfluous. The sentence works perfectly without it: "I'll have a sparkling water, sir." This means that the commas surrounding the "please" are necessary.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2016-08-01T15:40:57Z (over 8 years ago)
Original score: 0