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Wednesday, 17 March 2004
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Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
BookBy Lynne Truss
In February 2003 a Cambridge politics lecturer named Glen Rangwala received a copy of the British government's most recent dossier on Iraq. He quickly recognised in it the wholesale copying of a twelve-year-old thesis by American doctoral student Ibrahim al-Marashi, "reproduced word for word, misplaced comma for misplaced comma."
Lynne Truss manages to produce a book on punctuation that is edifying, hilariously funny, and even ties in historical and current events. What a remarkable feat.
She gets a little shrill and panicky over the casualisation of writing owing to the ill-effects of the Internet (young people these days!). In particular, she decries the practice of using punctuation marks to produce emoticons. This is the only point I think she is off-base on. In a novel, emoticons are unnecessary: if your audience doesn't get your sarcastic joke, you won't lose a friend or create an awkward working relationship. You are talking to strangers. In person of course they are unnecessary as you have that much more powerful emoticon: your face. But in letters and email, we have this problem. It is nice to make jokes, but important that the audience sees them as such — more important in fact than the audience finding them amusing. So we carefully label our humour with an emoticon, or, in letters, the parenthetical advice, "(joke)". Big deal. It's not the end of civilisation.
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