From Lynne Truss, #7

I’m posting my final entry from Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the calendar created from the book of the same name by Lynne Truss. This entry is from August 9, 2009:

It is worrying that people are no longer learning how to use the colon and semicolon, not least because, in this supreme QWERTY keyboard era, the little finger of the right hand, deprived of its traditional function, may eventually dwindle and drop off from disuse.

From Lynne Truss, #6

The calendar Eats, Shoots and Leaves was written by Lynne Truss, taken from the book of the same name. I’ve been sharing a few favorites. This one is from July 2, 2009:

Cecil Hartley, in his Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing (1818), includes this little poem, which tells us the simple one-two-three of punctuation values:

The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev’ry clause.
At ev’ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three:
The period fourth, as learned men agree.

And just one more remains.

From Lynne Truss, #5

We’re continuing to look at my favorites from the 2009 Eats, Shoots and Leaves calendar taken from Lynne Truss’s book. This fifth offering is from April 29, 2009:

The trend in the 20th century has been towards ever-simpler punctuation, but take any passage from a non-contemporary writer and you can’t help seeing the constituent words as so many defeated sheep that have been successfully corralled by good old Comma the Sheepdog.

Only two more to go after this one.