Comma Sense
A Fun-damental Guide to Punctuation
-
- USD 11.99
-
- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
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.
Don't expect Comma Sense to be a dry, academic tome. On the contrary, the authors show how each mark of punctuation—no matter how seemingly arcane—can be effortlessly associated 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. But this book is way more than a flight of whimsy. When you've finished Comma Sense, you'll not only have mastered everything you need to know about punctuation through Lederer and Shore's simple, clear, and right-on-the-mark rules, you'll have had fun doing so. When you're done laughing and learning, you'll be a veritable punctuation whiz, ready to make your marks accurately, sensitively, and effectively.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lederer has long been one of America's most popular experts on language and grammar, but here he seems to be taking his cue from Lynn Truss in focusing on the ins and outs of commas, semi-colons and the other little dots and dashes that punctuate our writing. Lederer, with writer and editor Shore, tries a bit too hard to convince readers of the importance of good punctuation ("Good punctuation makes for a good life") and to make the whole business amusing (the period is "a mark so dinky that farsighted fleas court it"); disquisitions on Seabiscuit and Albert Einstein's hair are distractions rather than entertainments. And all the talk of how the apostrophe is like Jesse James explains less than Lederer's straightforward usage examples, such as the serious differences in meaning between these two sentences: "The butler stood in the doorway and called the guests names"; "The butler stood in the doorway and called the guests' names." Yes, punctuation is important, and the bold-face print for basic rules does make this an easy-to-use guide for the punctuationally perplexed.
