I’m a really, really serious editor, and I’m really, really dedicated to proper punctuation. Why? Because it matters.
Fortunately, I’m not quite the only person who thinks this way. Lynne Truss does, as well. Here are three quotations from her:
“A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“‘Why?’ asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“‘I’m a panda,’ he says, at the door. ‘Look it up.’
“The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.’”
“To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as ‘Thank God its Friday’ (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive ‘its’ (no apostrophe) with the contractive ‘it’s’ (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian ‘kill’ response in the average stickler.”
“We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.”
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