Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Lynne Truss

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. "Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's."
If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.

What would Ms Truss think of my blog? I make a point of removing almost all quotation marks, as well as much of the punctuation from posted pieces. Oh dear. While Ms Truss's "Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" is clear, helpful, and perhaps even warranted, I found myself thinking that she might have missed something: namely that people miss things. Many of the cases of intolerable punctuation she cites seem to me to be lapses of thought rather than the absence of knowledge. To be sure, the case she cites in the quotation above is not likely to be such an instance, but in general I felt that many times punctuation is misused it stems from trying to think too fast and not rereading what has been written rather than ignorance of the rules. Ms Truss even acknowledges this in a few instances but says there can be no excuse. Perhaps she is right. After all, this is our language and we, in speaking, surely shoulder the responsibility of changing it. For that, Eats, Shoots & Leaves ought to be commended. And she does appreciate the beauty of punctuation done well, which is something that I admire. However, there is a point after which priggishness of her sort tears beauty apart rather than helping others admire it.