Comma Sense

"A clear, entertaining, and just plain helpful guide to the American rules of punctuation." —Lynne Truss, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Are you confounded by commas, addled by apostrophes, or queasy about quotation marks? Do you believe a bracket is just a support for a wall shelf, a dash is something you make for the bathroom, and a colon and semicolon are large and small intestines? If so, language humorists Richard Lederer and John Shore (with the sprightly aid of illustrator Jim McLean), have written the perfect book to help make your written words perfectly precise and punctuationally profound.


With buoyant wit and erudition, Comma Sense reveals the power and importance of each mark of punctuation. Lederer and Shore demonstrate what each has in common with a great American icon: the underrated yet powerful period with Seabiscuit; the jazzy semicolon with Duke Ellington; even the rebel apostrophe with famed outlaw Jesse James. When you've finished Comma Sense, you'll not only have mastered everything you need to know about punctuation, you'll have had fun doing so.