Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.
Humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes),
That man was Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515) and I will happily admit I hadn't heard of him until about a year ago, but am now absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babie...
Oh yes, sir. There's no doubt about it, sir.The Punctuation Murderer has struck again.
For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word Book’s with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accel...
When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.
Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.
In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit b...
If we looked inside ourselves and remembered how insignificant we are, just for a couple of minutes a day, respect for other people would be an automatic result.
I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons – and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsib...
There used to be a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come in to complain, and he would then talk them in...
The American essayist Lewis Thomas on the semicolon: The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added [ . . .] The period [or fu...
Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe.
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.
If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation.
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...
I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons
Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected)...
What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world.
We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first p...