The ingenuous, half-comprehending narrative of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go relies on pairs of dashes, as his protagonist, Kathy H, keeps awkwardly inserting her explanations and reservations. So, for instance, the fastidious aesthetic details and social nuances of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty require a highly punctuated prose: slight qualifications are carefully marked off with commas, and parallel clauses arranged around semi-colons. How do the best writers structure their sentences? Rereading Eats, Shoots & Leaves and seeing the strange punctuation of Virginia Woolf or Henry Fielding, I thought how you might characterise the style of some of the best novels of recent years by their punctuation habits. What is most enjoyable about the book, however, is not its parade of errors and confusion, but its demonstration of the nuances that careful punctuation can produce. The criminological metaphor in her subtitle - "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" - has aroused some antagonism, implying that the arraignment of offenders is the business of anyone who cares about the language. "Despair was the initial impetus for this book," writes Lynne Truss, and she begins by mustering illustrations of contemporary carelessness about the use of apostrophes or commas. Eats, Shoots & Leaves presents itself as a last-ditch defence of the subtleties of English punctuation.
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