how would you punctuate this sentence?

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by bookman156

Bit late to the party, but happened to read this thread.

The best way to punctuate the sentence is clearly: 'Her vulnerability, her inability to tolerate ridicule, had led her to kill another human being.'

Has she killed other human beings? Or is this her first and perhaps only? The sentence is ambiguous in that regard, despite the effort to punctuate it correctly.

I think the overwhelming consensus is that you are right.

[Penforhire]

Late here also but I agree with Pdurrant on #1 being technically correct.

My only bone to pick is "...had led her..." instead of "...led her..." Your past perfect tense is correct, I think, but out of favor.

[bookman156]

It's questionable whether the supposed motive force led her to do something or led to a situation arising. The sense of the sentence that I suppose is there is that she didn't intend to kill the person but it happened because of conditioning she was oblivious of until the situation arose and she'd ended up killing someone. She may of course still be oblivious of it, since it is the narrator speaking, not her. If that is the right reading, then her inability to tolerate ridicule didn't actually motivate her as such, but rather led to a situation arising. In other words, it didn't lead her to kill someone, rather it led to her killing someone. A subtle difference.

[pendragginp]

I believe he meant 'another human being' as apart from herself.

[ApK]

Wow, I can't believe I missed this thread. Probably totally moot now, but what about a dash or two:

'Her vulnerability -- an inability to tolerate ridicule -- had led her to kill another human being.'

I think that makes it more clear that you are describing one factor, not listing two.

There was just a DWT post about this.

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by pendragginp

I believe he meant 'another human being' as apart from herself.

Sure, I assume so too. But the ambiguity over whether it's another human being she's killed because she just can't stop killing human beings remains, as silly as it might be. In this case, most people won't notice the ambiguity because of idiomatic usage, but in some other case if an author doesn't notice an ambiguity they may end up with the reader reading something they didn't intend to write.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by ApK

Wow, I can't believe I missed this thread. Probably totally moot now, but what about a dash or two:

'Her vulnerability -- an inability to tolerate ridicule -- had led her to kill another human being.'

I think that makes it more clear that you are describing one factor, not listing two.

There was just a DWT post about this.

Agreed. Parenthetical expressions (of which this appears to be an example) should typically be surrounded by em dashes or parentheses, not commas. Using commas isn't per se incorrect, but using them around such phrases makes the sentence considerably harder to read.

I might also suggest changing "an" to "the":

Her vulnerability—the inability to tolerate ridicule—had led her to kill another human being.