Would it make sense to change the title?
I read it to be about people who bought AMD-only laptops from System76, needing to return them to System76 for some reason.
I read it to be about people who bought AMD-only laptops from System76, needing to return them to System76 for some reason.
I thought there were factory problems, a page with information about product returns, and possibly a story around that.
E.g. "System76 AMD-Only Laptop, Returns"
"System76 brings back AMD-only laptop" would be an extremely clear way to phrase the title. I'm not even sure the "only" is even that helpful; it could probably just be "AMD laptop".
Given the ongoing mess with the AMD 7900 XTX GPU vapor chambers, I initially interpreted the title to mean there was some problem with AMD laptops, so System76 was offering returns only for those laptops with AMD chips. That is not the case.
There are two verbs in your example, so it’s simply not a relevant example since the second verb is forming a separate sentence. It’s just connected with a comma in order to inform the reader that it is reusing the context of the previous sentence. In this specific example, that really makes it a broken sentence fragment, but it is often acceptable if it is being done poetically, which it arguably is there.
I phrased my previous comment carefully. The verb is never isolated from the rest of the sentence by a comma. “Posts” is the complete sentence; it just has an implicit subject and object.
It’s possible there are nuanced counterexamples somewhere that I’m somehow overlooking, but none of them are relevant to whether putting a comma between “laptop” and “returns” would make the title clearer.
But, if you’d like to try again with only a single verb…
You're going to upset people if you don't consider their opinions.
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"Rule of thumb: a comma indicates a pause in speech." [1]
[1] https://site.uit.no/english/punctuation/rules-for-comma-usag...
The real, specific rules that are listed after also don’t contradict anything I’ve said, as far as I can see. Can you please point to the specific rule on that page that says a comma would be useful here?
A comma does not fix this title.
I’m not claiming to be the single best person in the world at English grammar, but I have tried my best to learn a thing or two about it over the years. I have also tried to clearly explain the relevant grammar to the best of my ability. I have apparently failed to explain it well enough, so I’m done here, since trying more won’t make a difference for such an irrelevant diversion from the main topic.
Next: Read the original title (including the additional comma) out loud, pausing slightly in place of the comma.
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Which makes _more_ sense?
Too nuanced and pedantic, understood.
Take a step back and think about your style of communication.
It could be improved.
Based on the distribution of downvotes and upvotes between your original comment and my original comment (which is at +13), I think most people on this post overwhelmingly agreed with me, for whatever that is worth. Good communication requires figuring out what works for most people, not just one person, and short of running some focus group testing, the vote distribution is the best available proxy for that here, in my opinion.
> It could be improved.
Communication can always be improved, and I’m always trying. I agree there is still room for improvement. I’m sorry if it isn’t good enough yet.