We might be inclined to think that it was Lynne Truss of England who started the sudden surge of interest in the comma and other forms of punctuation, and understandably so. After all, her 2004 book about the comma,
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, became a phenomenal bestseller in both the United Kingdom and the United States, making thousands of English learners turn to it for guidance on the dash, hyphen, colon, and semicolon. As one Amazon.com reviewer has raved, “The book is zero tolerance indeed. Truss says it doesn’t matter if 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 ...’ and she lists some ghastly punishments.”
And the marketing success of
Eats, Shoots & Leaves had continued even with such dismissive critiques as that of Harvard University English professor Louis Menand, who, as earlier reported in this Forum, had debunked the book for committing several dozen punctuation errors itself and summed it up as follows: “
Eats, Shoots & Leaves presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.”
Recently, I discovered that although Lynne Truss’s
Eats, Shoots & Leaves remains the undisputed market leader in the punctuation-instruction industry, some other book in the genre had preceded it with great aplomb if not as much publicity. That book is
The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon, a former English teacher in the United States. The book was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2003—or at least a year before
Eats, Shoots & Leaves made it to the bestsellers list in London and roared across the Atlantic to become a
New York Times bestseller as well.
The New Well-Tempered Sentence is a charmingly illustrated revision of Gordon’s punctuation handbook that first saw publication in 1983. She had enlarged the handbook for the 2003 edition with more extensive explanations of the rules of punctuation and more illustrations. And from the looks of it, the book is a much more instructive, more entertaining—if decidedly Gothic—incursion into English punctuation than
Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Although the revised edition was met with mixed reviews—some say the revision “has gotten too clever for its own good” even if the book “is miles beyond any other of its kind”—I think that a marketing effort comparable to that for
Eats, Shoots & Leaves would easily catapult T
he New Well-Tempered Sentence to the former’s best-seller league.
For consider how engagingly and beautifully Gordon states her case for punctuation: “However frenzied, disarrayed, or complicated your thoughts might be, punctuation tempers them. We rarely give these symbols a second glance: they’re like invisible servants in fairy tales—the ones who bring glasses of water and pillows, not storms of weather or love. One quick blink and you’ve caught the comma’s or slash’s or hyphen’s message, or huddled in a parenthetical clasp. Like well-trained prodigies, punctuation marks can exceed your expectations, even defy belief.”
And look at just a few of the charming punctuation prescriptions of
The New Well-Tempered Sentence:
Do NOT use quotation marks to indicate a cliché—it only emphasizes the cliché-ishness.
During last week’s monsoon, it really “rained cats and dogs.”
Use single quotes to indicate quotations within quotations.
The teacher made Jedediah write “‘Sod off’ is not an appropriate conclusion to a business letter”
300 times.
A colon introduces a part of a sentence that explains or exemplifies the main idea.
Pain stood in the way like a sheet of glass: you could walk through it, but not without a certain
noise.
Besides sniffing cigars and snapping suspenders, there was one thing sure to be on the tycoons’
agenda: money.
There are three reasons for his absenteeism: fear of furniture, aversion to numbers and dollar
signs, and a snakebite on his chin.
This is how I found him: mesomorphic, monosyllabic, and debonair.
No wonder then that
The New York Times has said of Gordon that she “manages to make the period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, and semicolon sound friendlier instead of forbidding.”
Preview Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The New Well-Tempered Sentence in Google BooksRELATED READINGS:Has modern life killed the semicolon?When the
Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law professors dueling with swords, the dispute wasn’t over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. “The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm,” noted the Times. “His adversary maintained that it should be a colon.”
Read Paul Collins’ essay, “Has modern life killed the semicolon?” in SlateThe joy of exclamation marks!Exclamation marks used to be frowned upon. Now look what’s happened! We use them all the time! Hurrah!!! But what is it about the age of email that gets people so over-excited?
Read Stuart Jeffries’ “The joy of exclamation marks” in The Guardian----------
Acknowledgment: Thanks to Ed Maranan for calling my attention to Paul Collin’s essay, “Has modern life killed the semicolon?”
