No, Okta, senior management, not an errant employee, caused you to get hacked

ZeroCool@feddit.ch to Technology@lemmy.world – 339 points –
No, Okta, senior management, not an errant employee, caused you to get hacked
arstechnica.com
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Title seems correct but confusing

No Okta, it was senior management, not an errant employee, that caused you to get hacked

You still need the comma before Okta to be grammatically correct.

More correct would be to just use multiple sentences.

“No, Okta. It was senior management, not an errant employee, that caused you to get hacked.

That makes sense! I sometimes leave out commas that are probably necessary but feel excessive. I should just work on rephrasing things in a way such that commas aren't necessary to begin with

Commas, although sometimes omitted, should be used, and used often, as a means to clarify, and especially improve, long-winded statements, such as this one.

You could use a semicolon rather than a fullstop as well:

“No, Okta; it was senior management, not an errant employee, that caused you to get hacked.”

That may help elucidate the meaning better while maintaining a single sentence, as is par for the course with headlines.

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For real, had to read it like 3x to understand. The amount of commas in the OP title is just unnatural. I might even do:

No Okta, it was senior management - not an errant employee - that caused you to get hacked.

If that's wrong, then I have no idea what hyphens are for lol.

In this case, those hyphens should be em dashes (a great punctuation mark).

Use them when trying to split up a sentence — like when you need to inject information that breaks the sentence flow — without splitting it into multiple sentences. They're like parentheses that emphasize their information instead of quietly setting it to the side.

On Windows, the alt code is 0151. On Android (and iOS?), just hold down on the hyphen key and choose the longest option. No clue how to get it on macOS.

I ended up learning about em dashes about a year ago on one of my random knowledge-for-writing binges I do! idk why but they're one of my favorite pieces of trivia to throw at people

I read both of those correctly.....then, I re-read the title with punctuation...ooof.

This is a case where I’d actually use parentheses.

No, Okta, it was senior management (not an errant employee) that got you hacked.

No, Okta; senior management caused you to get hacked, not an errant employee.

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