Anyone who's insane enough to think they want to write for a living
absolutely must read this book. Period.
Before they do so, however, they need a crash course in British humor and
culture. Allow me to make a few recommendations:
1. Nearly every Rowan Atkinson DVD you can lay hands on, including his
HBO specials and The Complete Black Adder.
2. All things Monty Python.
3. Anything R.D. Wingfield.
4. A broad sampling of P.G. Wodehouse.
5. Several hours of the REAL BBC. Not that fake American rip-off.
Now you're ready to appreciate the subtleties of this absolutely divine
book, and you'll understand why the British turned a little book about
proper punctuation into an international mega-hit.
Lynne Truss is chock full of dry British wit. She's also a stickler for proper
punctuation. Between those two things, you'll laugh yourself sick while
learning where those finicky little marks go, and how to use italics, and
other such mysteries of the English language.
This book was almost responsible for me not going to a wine bar. I started
it in the hour between finding out when a friend would come fetch me and
waiting for her to do so. I laughed so hard I nearly cried. My neighbors
were probably wondering if it was finally time to call the mental health
authorities. They would have if they'd known all that mirth was caused by
a grammar book.
You must laugh at passages like this: "One solitary obsessive, feebly
armed with an apostrophe on a stick, will never have the nerve to
demonstrate outside Warner Brothers on the issue of Two Weeks Notice."
Lynne makes these things personal. She makes you want to pick up an
apostrophe on a stick and troop out to the nearest movie studio, because
she makes punctuation personal. You really feel for these poor, abused,
and misused little marks. You want to start a Royal Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Punctuation. And you want it to be Royal rather
than American because, somehow, it seems right that way.
About the only thing she didn't cover in this succinct little book is what to
do when you're ending a sentence with a book title which has punctuation
inappropriate to the ending of your sentence, such as, "I'll next be profiling
Watchdogs of Democracy?" Lynne, help me - is there a period after the
question mark? What do I do?! But every other situation's covered,
including the interrobang (?!) used above - you'll find it on page 196.
I believe the thing I loved the most was that there was none of this
academic snootiness. Lynne couldn't care less if you know what a
dangling participle or a comma splice is. She doesn't thumb her nose at
the unwashed masses of us who can't diagram a sentence. All she wants
to see is people getting along with punctuation. She makes a great
argument that language (and punctuation) can, do and must change to
remain living, working beings. But she also makes a hell of an argument
for being the rear guard, insisting on apostrophes, dashes, colons,
semi-colons, ellipses, and all the rest being used for more than smileys.
I learned a lot from this book. I got much more friendly with plural
possessive names like Jeeves's, and feel on much firmer ground when it
comes to hyphenating words. I also got a full dose of pure British snark,
and was able to polish up my British accent just in time for reading a
massive amount of P.G. Wodehouse.
This book will not only give you insight into how to punctuate, but set you
free to do it. Lynne may be a stickler, but she recognizes there's wiggle
room. There's individual taste. She elevates grammar from a dull set of
rules learned by rote to absolute Art.
So if you haven't already, read this book. You'll be shocked at how much
you love punctuation after it. Now if only someone will do the same for
spelling...
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