by Lynne Truss
Gotham Books, 2003
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. She 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 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. 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
correct my essays using the 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.”
