Lynne Truss Quote
Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots . . . you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes — that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity — well, they are the colons and semicolons.
Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots . . . you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes — that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity — well, they are the colons and semicolons.
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About Lynne Truss
Besides her promotion of linguistic prescription and commentary on English grammar, Truss has written many radio plays, both comedic and dramatic. She has also written grammar guides for children and novels, including crime fiction. She was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 2021.