Never Write a Book About Writing

Even the people who put themselves forward as the defenders of the language, the cranks who love nothing more than spotting someone else’s errors, the maniacs who would dare to write books about writing, get caught up in the complexities of English. Take the example of Lynne Truss’s shockingly popular-- for a book on grammar and punctuation-- rant, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Truss characterizes herself as the ultimate language crank, turning what is basically despair over misplaced or missing apostrophes into the basis for a whole (if slim and wide-margined) book. It’s entertaining in the way rants often are and she provides some funny examples. Still, the impression Truss creates is that she isn’t exactly someone you’d want to share an email exchange with. Chances are she’d rather grade your message rather than read it, then she’d use it as an amusing example in her next book. Which is probably why the response of so many critics was to take out their red pens and mark up her prose. The toughest response may have been that of Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, who doesn’t get very far before digging in the long knives:

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero ToleranceApproach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “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.

A non-restrictive clause not preceded by a comma! Oh my! Menand goes on to provide a catalog of Truss’s sins:

The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as “of course” are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not. Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases (“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”), before correlative conjunctions (“Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t”), and in prepositional phrases (“including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final ‘s’ ”). Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: “You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors."

So what’s one to do when “experts” on punctuation and grammar, people with book deals and (presumably) professional editors available to them, can’t keep things straight? How are we supposed to get the commas right in our correlative conjunctions if they can’t? What the hell is a correlative conjunction, anyway? Truss’s first mistake was to set herself up as an expert in the first place. Anyone who puts themselves in this position is just asking for trouble because they are going to have to watch every comma they use for the rest of their lives. Because Truss’s biggest problem is that she sets her rules of punctuation down in black and white, then proceeds to break them. Most of us won’t ever find ourselves in this position and don’t even have to worry about memorizing all of the rules and their oddball exceptions. What we want to do is gain a basic understanding of the rules and try to be consistent. Unless it makes your writing hard to read and understand, it’s probably not the end of the world if you abuse an apostrophe or indulge in a superfluous comma every now and then. As long as you’re not writing a book on grammar and punctuation, that is.