Speak Selection and Spoken Content ignore punctuation

I receive long essays via an email subscription and decided to give my eyes a rest by using Speak Selection. This was my first experience with it, and I too noticed that ends of sentences and paragraph breaks were often ignored, causing run-on sentences. Commas sometimes resulted in full stops, and other times were barreled through as though they didn’t exist. Sometimes the voice would pause mid-sentence for no apparent reason. Comprehension was difficult. What a disappointment. I thought text-to-speech technology had gotten better than this!

It's actually so bad that it can only be deliberately so, and Apple simply seems to ignore inquiries on the subject. I have found that Android's text-to-speech is significantly better.