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
Story
Help
Understand
Punctuation
Helping
Stumbling
Stories
Courtesy
Without
Designed
Readers
Reader

More quotes by 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
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
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
I used to help my dad with a stall selling eggs when I was about 12. People were so hard up they would ask for one egg. But mostly no one came by at all. It was very demoralising.
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
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
Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
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
After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.
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
The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
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
I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end.
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 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.
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
Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
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