Sunday, April 17, 2011

Proper punctuation is both the sign and cause of clear thinking

I love lazy Sunday's and usually take the time to catch up on my reading. I have 4 books on my shelf right now I have started and not finished. However, one book I just HAVE to tell the world about is called " Eat's, Shoots, & Leaves" by Lynne Truss, a columnist for "The Times" (a newspaper in London) and she is absolutely brilliant! The book is about her zero tolerance approach to punctuation. As I am typing this post I am trying to take caution in my own punctuation and spelling (as to not dissapoint my new hero Ms. Truss). Anyways, I won't ruin the book by telling what all it entails but I will leave my favorite excerpt from the book so far:          

   "Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else -- yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves. Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions. Being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda."
 ***The title of the book was chosen after Lynne noticed a panda defined in an encyclopedia as 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots, and leaves.'****

As an added bonus the book even comes with a punctuation repair kit full of stickers for comma mistakes you may see everyday on signs! This book is a must read and I am ordering her other book from Amazon "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today". I promise you will love the book, let your inner nerd run free!

Happy Sunday!

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