Arie's Reviews > Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

According to Lynne Truss, I'm a "stickler". I've been known to spend a good hour or more obsessing over the placement of a comma, a semi-colon, a hyphen, a dash. Are my brackets formed correctly? Have I left my sentence hanging on a cliff-edge with a poorly placed dash?

Even worse is the feeling that occurs when coming across such a cliff-edge while reading; a stomach lurching queasiness that something doesn't feel right, and if only that editor had paid a little more attention we wouldn't be in this mess!

I've been told off by my (dyslexic -I really can be an awful person) partner for rearranging his commas when in fact all he wanted to know dammit is if necessary was spelt right (something I'm admittedly rather less certain about than the placement of those poor little punctuation marks).

I won't even start on the state of the average Facebook post or blog comment. Besides, Lynne Truss covers it all so well in this book.

I no longer feel alone.

But seriously now, the poor apostrophe is being so mistreated - can this book be made essential reading in schools? It's fun, easy to read, explains clearly and humourously, and would make far superior reading to most dull textbooks. People might actually start punctuating their (not "they're") sentences in ways that don't make us punctuation sticklers want to weep.

I am also very, very aware of the potentially contentious Oxford comma in the previous paragraph - not to mention petrified that in all my above ranting I've left a mark out of place and will rightly be in a great deal of trouble for it later.