Literary Birthday – 31 May – Lynne Truss

Happy Birthday, Lynne Truss, born 31 May 1955.

Lynne Truss Quotes

1. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.
2. I’ve been a full-time working writer for over twenty-five years now, but I realise this is no excuse for the mountains of stuff I seem to have produced. I can only apologise, and say that, although you wouldn’t think so, I do sometimes stop writing, have a cup of tea, and re-organise the dog treats or something.
3. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
4. 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.
5. Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
6. We read privately, mentally listening to the author’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
7. 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.
8. Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.
9. Brackets come in various shapes, types and names: 1. round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses) 2. square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call brackets].
10. The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day.

Lynne Truss is an English author, journalist, novelist, and radio broadcaster and dramatist. She is known for her championing of the English language in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. She has written three novels: Going Loco; Tennyson’s Gift; and With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed. She has also written novels, and grammar guides for children. Visit www.lynnetruss.com

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lynne_Truss,_author_(15906630064).jpg

Terry Ballard from Merrick, New York, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Source for quotes

 by Amanda Patterson

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