Lynn Truss on courtesy in speech and writing.

 

Lynn Truss Talk to the Hand (2005) Truss is seriously annoyed by rudeness. Not the rudeness of ignoring merely fashionable etiquette, but the rudeness of ignoring other people’s rights, especially the right to be treated with respect. Her reaction is to stay inside and bolt the door. Maybe escaping rudeness can make for a more peaceful life, but it will be lonely one.
Truss’s six reasons for staying inside are:
* Was That So Hard To Say? (about Please and Thank you)
* Why Am I The One Doing This? (about downloading customer service onto the customer, etc)
* My Bubble, My Rules (about being a good guest, among other things)
* The Universal Eff-Off Reflex
* Booing The Judges (about fake egalitarianism)
* Someone Else Will Clean It Up
Of course her remarks go beyond my simplistic summary phrases. She’s well worth reading, more than once, which I intend to do. ****

Lynn Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) Truss’s first book. Her defence of good punctuation has, I hope, done some good. But she doesn’t go far enough: Punctuation is the (inevitably inadequate) method for signalling syntactic structure. The title demonstrates this admirably. But Truss doesn’t follow through. She discusses the conventions very well, and provides wonderful examples of what happens when writers ignore them. But her explanations of the rationales are too often misleading. For example, her differentiation between ; : . These marks correspond to the subtle signals in speech that there’s more to come, with some hint as to how it’s related to what’s just been said. The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark, but a spelling mark, as are the diacritic and the hyphen.

      I guess I want more conceptual rigour. But that’s nit-picking. Truss has done us all a service, and she’s done it with grace, humour, and nuanced awareness of how we differ in our pointing preferences. Buy this book, follow its advice, and read it at least once a year. ****