I mean, full stops are quite important, aren't they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burn-out from all the thankless effort.
Lynne TrussAs with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket.
Lynne Trusswe are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.
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Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.
Lynne TrussMots clés manners etiquette grammar punctuation
...punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Lynne TrussMots clés grammar punctuation
Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point.
Lynne TrussMots clés grammar-humor
No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
Lynne TrussMots clés grammar punctuation
We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
Lynne TrussMots clés reading books reading-books journeys
She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can't lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is upon her to see it in a different place.
Lynne TrussMots clés invalids
Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.
Lynne TrussMots clés madness
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