Is it a right sentence?

A friend of mine texted me this but I'm wondering if it is right sentence.
I couldn't meet up last weekend so he took a raincheck today and texted me "I was thinking, if you don't mind, how about we change our next meeting place? "
I think "I was thinking if you don't mind, how about ..." is a right sentence so it would be great if someone who read my question answers why he put a punctuation mark after "thinking".

No.2 回答者： kjohn3 回答日時： 2016/11/23 21:20

This is a conversational sentence, so he used a comma to represent how it would sound when spoken. You could just say "I was thinking... how about〇〇", but "if you don't mind" is added to make the sentence sound softer or less direct. The comma there is perfectly natural!

Also, don't worry about commas too much when you're not writing a formal paper. Native speakers mess them up all the time!

No.1 回答者： ひぐまん 回答日時： 2016/11/23 10:45

You seem to be getting nervous about not so important thing. In m

y opinion, this comma, just represents his/her hesitation or wavering status of his/her mind. It can be replaced with, "well," or "you know". It's just my opinion, though, texting is a casual expression of one's feeling, sometimes not like more formal mails. When you stick to the "right" sentence, it would rather be something like; "I was thinking about the possibility of changing our next meeting place if you don't mind." But as I mentioned, since it's a texting, he/she just expressed what he/she has in mind right off the bat, in other word, texted the words in order of what phrase popped up in his/her mind, as a result, it turned up in this way. It's nothing to be getting annoyed.