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.

From Lynne Truss, #4

Lynne Truss pictures the comma has a sheepdog in this April 28 entry from her 2009 Eats, Shoots and Leaves calendar. Out of the 365 pages, I saved just a handful. Here’s #4:

Between the 16th century and the present day, the comma became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. The comma has so many jobs as “separator” (punctuation marks are traditionally either “separators” or “terminators”) that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organizing words into sensible groups and making them stay put; sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and, of course, darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up an wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom.

From Lynn Truss, #3

This is another charming description about punctuation from the 2009 Eats, Shoots and Leaves calendar, by Lynne Truss, April 10.

On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.

When I was home schooling and trying to explain the “optional” uses of the comma, where its use is solely determined by the writer as to the required pause, this would have been a good way to explain it. What do you, the author, want the reader to do? How do you want the reader to hum the tune? That’s how you think about those yes-or-no commas.

Like!

From Lynne Truss, #2

This is another entry I particularly enjoyed from Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves calendar, for April 5, 2009

Humorist James Thurber was once asked: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living room’?” And his answer was one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma was a way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

This is such a perfect explanation. Beyond the charming way of expressing his use of the comma, it is useful in actual writing. More than once since reading this, I have assessed the use of a questionable comma on this basis.

Good stuff!