I instant-messaged someone whom I’ll call Kathy while talking with her in a conference call.

I wrote, “I asked, Kathy, about the session sheets because …”

She replied, “…who did you send this to?”

After some confusing back-and-forth, I realized that Kathy did not see the commas in what I initially wrote.

She thought that I wrote, “I asked Kathy about the session sheets because …” That would have been a third-person reference to Kathy. She thought that I had instant-messaged someone else with “I asked Kathy about the session sheets because …” before instant-messaging the same thing to her.

Instead, because I wrote, “I asked, Kathy, about the session sheets because …”, I was referring to her in the first person. I was trying to make my instant message more personal by pausing (with commas) to include her name.

Lessons:
1. Commas can change a third-person reference to a first-person reference.
2. Don’t assume that readers will see your commas, especially in an instant-messaging situation.
3. Don’t assume that a reader who sees your commas will know that these are equivalent to pauses in the spoken version of what you write. If a reader can’t “hear” the pauses implied by the commas, then the reader will read a first-person reference as a third-person reference.