Rating: 4 stars
Cover synopsis: Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now "txt msgs," we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are.
My husband came home last night and I was sitting on the couch, book in hand, laughing. "What are you reading?" he asks. "Oh, a book about punctuation," I reply.
Crickets.
OK. I admit. I'm a bit of a grammar nerd. But non-GN's would enjoy this book too! With hilarious commentary, Truss makes punctuation a bit easier to digest. She emphasizes the important need we have for punctuation in our society, especially in this age when it seems to be going out the window due to email, text messaging, etc. Says Truss: "We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and allusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking."
Amen.
A couple of beefs: This was a book originally written in England, and grammar rules are a bit different across the pond. For example, they don't put punctuation inside quotation marks; ["...the cause of clear thinking".] but in America we do. I was also expecting a bit more clarification on the hyphen, but that chapter seemed to have been tacked on as an afterthought. Still, the chapter on the colon and semi-colon were illuminating (and quite entertaining). And I'm still laughing about her teenaged experience with an American pen pal. A jolly-good read.
