Lynne Truss Quotes

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first!... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.

I don't think, in my entire 18 years as a student, I ever used an exclamation point in an academic paper.

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

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.

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semicolin; it's a useful little chap

Punctuation, is? fun!

The censure of frequent and long parentheses has led writers into the preposterous expedient of leaving out the marks by which they are indicated. It is no cure to a lame man to take away his crutches.

I would die at the stake rather than change a semi-colon!

Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken. Oh, the Oxford comma. Here, in case you don't know what it is yet, is the perennial example, as espoused by Harold Ross: "The flag is red, white, and blue." So what do you think of it? Are you for or against it? Do you hover in between?

All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.

I believe that should is one of the most damaging words in our language. Every time we use it, we are, in effect, saying that we are wrong, or we were wrong, or we're going to be wrong. I would like to take the word should out of our vocabulary forever and replace it with the word could. This word gives us a choice, and we're never wrong.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural.