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Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.

Lynne Truss

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Lynne Truss
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: May 31
Author
Journalist
Writer
Kingston
Helping
Stumbling
Stories
Courtesy
Without
Designed
Readers
Reader
Story
Help
Understand
Punctuation

More quotes by Lynne Truss

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In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.
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Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
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You should read Wodehouse when you're well and when you're poorlywhen you're travelling, and when you're notwhen you're feeling clever, and when you're feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse always lifts your spirits,no matter how high they happen to be already.
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Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?
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I do needlepoint from kits. I give them as gifts to people in the form of cushion covers and they are often speechless with horror.
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The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
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As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.
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It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody.
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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.
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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. Are they being alarmist?
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Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.
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Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of The Lord of the Rings. You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold.
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Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nice cooker. It is hard to accept that pricing is unrelated to quality, but it's plainly true. Nowadays, we pay the price that satisfies our particular personality type and then we live with the painful consequences.
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As with email, the recipient of a texted question seems to have the option to ignore it, while nevertheless saying hello, lovely day, and so on.
Lynne Truss
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There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.
Lynne Truss
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I am not against marriage. I lived with someone for 11 years. But we weren't in love, and I thought that was quite important.
Lynne Truss
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The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.
Lynne Truss
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What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.
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The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
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Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word punctilious (attentive to formality or etiquette) comes from the same original root as punctuation.
Lynne Truss