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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

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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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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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The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.
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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.
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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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The idea of withholding a massive secret is obviously quite exciting to some people. It is also the basis of much classic drama, of course, from Sophocles onwards.
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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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The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
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After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.
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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.
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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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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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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.
Lynne Truss
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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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I hate to be treated as if I'm invisible. I get incensed when people talk across me or refuse to catch my eye in a restaurant or shop.
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.
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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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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 brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.
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The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day.
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