~ Posted October 2020
Punctuation, says Lynne
Truss in her bestselling book Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is not a class issue nor is it “a way of
belittling the uneducated,” as some critics have said. Punctuation, she says,
is a system of printers’ marks that has aided the clarity of the written word
for the past half-millennium.
Lynne
Truss is an author, sportswriter, radio playwright, journalist, and wannabe
painter who was taken aback at the fanfare created by her small book on
punctuation. According to her website, www.lynnetruss.com, she felt
it “was a book that nobody could accuse of failure, because it couldn’t
possibly succeed.” In the book’s preface, Truss writes that the book is
aimed at people who care about punctuation, that “tiny minority of British
people” who believe punctuation has a place in our world. Her readers quickly
expanded beyond this small group of punctuation lovers. Apparently, the world
was ready and waiting for a book about dashes, colons, misplaced apostrophes,
and pesky little commas.
Eats,
Shoots and Leaves has spawned an industry: there is an illustrated
edition (2008), a children’s version (2006), a workbook (2011), and, of course,
an audio book. Truss wrote the book, she says, as a “rallying cry” to those whose
prose is hopelessly littered with colons, exclamation marks and dashes, or,
conversely, with run-on sentences that require an interpreter. Truss is done
with the English-speaking world playing loosey-goosey with punctuation, and, it
turns out, she is not alone. In his book, The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin
Random House/Doubleday 2015), Bill Bryson says that “… many people are not
merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but evidently don't
realize that there are fundamentals.” I assume Bryson and Truss are coffee
buddies!
Truss’ book discusses what academics call ‘syntactic ambiguity’, also known
as structural ambiguity. This is a new term to me, although scholarly articles
abound, entitled “lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity”, “semantic syntactic
ambiguity”, and my personal favourite, “syntactic ambiguity prosody,”
(don’t ask!). According to my non-academic source, Wikipedia, syntactic
ambiguity is when “a sentence can be interpreted in more than one way due to
ambiguous sentence structure.”
There are
many books on punctuation. Many. Penguin contracted R.L. Trask to write one (The
Penguin Guide to Punctuation, 1997). Amazon.ca has than 1,000 books on
the topic: illustrated books, children’s books, academic books, and specialty
books devoted to commas or apostrophes. Apparently, we who speak English so
carelessly have not fully grasped the basics of how to write it.
I asked
friends if they had read Truss’ book, and if so, what did they think? A common
response was “it was funny but didn’t finish it.” Interesting! My theory is
that, as it catapulted to stardom, Eats, Shoots and Leaves was
marketed as a very funny book about punctuation. Not so. Eats, Shoots
and Leaves is a book about punctuation that is very funny. It is
a book to teach us, written with wit and humour, but it is deadly serious about
the ramifications of overusing, underusing, and misusing punctuation.
Punctuation matters, Truss says, “even if it is only occasionally a matter of
life and death.”
Her
language is clear, her explanations sensible and understandable, and her
contribution to continuing the structural quality of written English is
stellar, although she is cognizant of the evolving stylistic shifts of written
English. For example, she says, books by Hardy or Dickens are littered with
what we consider today to be an overabundance of commas, semicolons, and
colons. She has words of warning, however. Clarity and punctuation go hand in
hand and one misplaced comma can cause a huge misunderstanding. Life or death
huge.
I grew up
in an ex-British colony, and I learned Serious British Punctuation, which
differs slightly from North American punctuation. Wimpled nuns of the Rigid
Punctuation Convention taught me. Mum was also keen on punctuation,
so I didn’t have a chance. I was taught that a full stop (period) comes after
quotation marks. North American convention places the period at the end of the
sentence but within the marks. This didn’t matter much until I went back to
school and profs continue to correct my essays using the North American convention, about which I
did not know. Thanks so much, Lynne, for clearing that up for me.
I’m going
to give Bill Bryson the last word, and I believe Lynne Truss would be pleased.
“So,” he says in the aforementioned blogpost, “here is all I am saying about
this. Stop it.”
