“To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution.”
This is the dedication in the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003) by Lynne Truss.
I was reminded of this book when I received a WhatsApp message from my 19-year old grandson recently. It was rather like reading James Joyce, a stream of consciousness about the everyday, with a casual approach to punctuation. (It really wasn’t like reading Joyce.) The message contained no punctuation, no capital letters, and it was in Dutch. I can read Dutch quite easily but punctuation helps.
Many years ago, during one of my Dutch lessons, we were given a newspaper article from which all punctuation and capitalization had been removed. Our task was to put back the commas, question marks, full stops and capital letters. This was surprisingly challenging, and an excellent learning experience.
Back to that WhatsApp. In my boomer way, I complained to family members in their 40s about what I considered to be a barely literate message. They explained that young people regard punctuation as aggressive, especially full stops at the end of a message. I understand those might be considered not strictly necessary, but aggressive? Apparently they are seen as closing down discussion. I would like to suggest – gently – that the absence of punctuation is hostile to older people and even more so, in this case, to non-native speakers of Dutch.
The subtitle of Truss’s book is not so gentle: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I’m totally with her on this, and her book is full of great examples of the sometimes life-threatening confusion arising from the absence or misuse of punctuation. The main title – Eats, Shoots and Leaves – refers to a gun-toting panda bear.
Commas save lives. There is an important difference between ‘Let’s eat, Grandma’ and ‘Let’s eat Grandma’.
Please read the book, and use punctuation correctly in memory of Bolshevik printers and to save the lives of grandmothers everywhere.
Sally Wyatt, professor of Digital Cultures