Clear, sound advice for anyone who needs to brush up on their use of the semicolon
For anyone who has done battle with a traditional grammar guide, this book is deliciously heretical.
Selwood (below) begins by repunctuating Shakespeare, then invites you to do the same. His message is simple: forget the rules. Do whatever makes your writing clear. Be creative. Enjoy it. English teachers of a certain sort will not be amused.
The fact is that most people who try to follow the old rules have some degree of punctuation anxiety. This is probably because, for decades, the average education taught us how to sabotage uniforms, to cope with inedible food and to survive the trauma of sports day, but it did not demystify grammar.
Most of us left school with fuzzy recollections of split infinitives, hanging participles and other constructions that seemed as irrelevant as they were incomprehensible.
Selwood’s approach is the opposite: get to grips with a few basics; avoid the most painful howlers: and relax. Punctuation Without Tears keeps the tone light and practical.
After a brief chapter on the purpose of punctuation, followed by another setting out three golden rules, the book devotes a short chapter to each punctuation mark, explaining how it should and should not be used.
The examples it gives through- out are a funny and irreverent mix of cartoon princesses and sci-fi/fantasy characters wrestling with life, heavy weaponry and bad attitudes.
The enthusiasm and sense of fun in the book is infectious, and it turns out to be effective. Selwood has tried hard to make it an enjoyable read — and it works.
The book’s subtitle is ‘Punctuate Confidently — in Minutes’, and the ultimate test is whether it succeeds in giving the reader a new-found confidence, quickly. The answer is that it should.
It takes less than an hour to read from cover to cover, and it is full of sound, practical advice: keep sentences short; use commas as pauses; spice it up with dashes; avoid brackets; if you’re feeling bold, throw in a semicolon or two; experiment; watch out for comma splices; don’t ever use the greengrocer’s apostrophe.
A book on punctuation is never going to be as popular as a cracking novel, but, after reading it, you might just have the confidence to write one.