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I would assume that his suggestions for clarity in "scientific papers" and his literary style don't overlap all that much to infer the former from the later.

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This is certainly the case, but it does make it all the more amusing that the myth

> Commas denote a pause in speaking.... Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.

made its way into this article. Hard to imagine that this particular point, to which I might attribute many of the comma splices I see in scientific writing, actually came from a professional writer.

McCarthy's books involve unrelenting violence. If he viewed commas as pauses, it makes sense that he would never use them.

It goes without saying that you're a better writer than Cormac McCarthy. Tell us something beyond that.

The implication was that likely not all of the advice in this article, which was written by biologists, is actually attributable to McCarthy.

> the former from the later

my writing advice:

never use the former and the latter

Does it make me sound pretentious? That's fine, we're debating literary styles after all. :D

no, it's just a stylistic pet peeve of mine. lacks specificity and always makes me have to think about which is the latter and which is the former, no matter how many times i look it up. scrambles my brain.

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