Quote

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

Lynne Truss

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Lynne Truss

Image
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
Image
Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Lynne Truss
Image
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
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?
Lynne Truss
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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?
Lynne Truss
Image
Oh, the illusion of choice in the modern world - don't get me started. But don't you agree that the Internet has softened our brains and made us forget that 'choice' used to mean something different from selecting options from menus?
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.
Lynne Truss
Image
What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.
Lynne Truss
Image
The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this means we should be very careful what we use it for.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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
Image
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.
Lynne Truss