Comment by jameshart
3 years ago
Personally, I think this sentence would benefit from a comma before the ‘or’. And in that case we could probably benefit from a clearer way of setting aside the parenthetical.
“Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art, or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable.”
– this seems awkward to me. This version, though:
“Sometimes writing for money—rather than for art, or pleasure—is really quite enjoyable.”
Isn’t that more fluid?
> “Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art, or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable.”
I think that changes the meaning, since it’s now a list of 3 items with an Oxford comma, rather than two lists, with the first list having 1 item, and the second list having 2 items. And I’m having a rough time even making sense of such revised meaning.
Expressed as pseudo-code, I read the original intent of that sentence as:
“money and not(art or pleasure) == enjoyable”
and that can be broken into
“((money and not art) or (money and not pleasure)) == enjoyable