Just days before Thanksgiving break, students may be losing their focus in anticipation for the upcoming holiday. But Lynne Truss, author of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," offered comic relief at this week's forum.

Although Truss mostly talked about her fascination with punctuation and why it's important to use it correctly, she had the audience laughing from her opening statement: "I'm tempted to do something rather wild, which is start by saying, 'Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.'"

Truss credits the success of her book with the built-up emotion in people who began noticing the decline in the intelligent use of punctuation 25 to 30 years ago.

"It was a huge desire for someone to say something about the state of written English," she said.

Laughing, Truss told students how she has become known as "grouchy" to consumers, a "completely implausible success" to publishers and "unbelievably lucky" to fellow authors.

Truss conveyed her passion for the English language through clever anecdotes and analogies. For example, she compared commas to sheep dogs in the way they herd different parts of sentences.

Truss said that when she sees a sign that says, "Children drive slowly," she thinks, "Well, that's a relief. If children are going to be driving at all, at least they'll be driving slowly."

When she sees speech marks around the word "fresh" in "fresh orange juice," Truss said, she doesn't think that it's extra fresh. It seems a bit dodgy, she joked.

"I proofread the world, really," Truss said.

She shared what she said was her most extreme example of this tendency. It happened a year or so ago, when the film "Rocky Balboa" came out in the United Kingdom. A poster for the movie bore the phrase, "It ain't over 'til it's over." Truss said there were supposed to be three apostrophes, but the apostrophe in "til" was backwards.

Other people kept saying, "'That's Sylvester Stallone, that's Sylvester Stallone!' And I was saying, 'Look at that apostrophe!'" Truss said.

Obviously, not all literacy is about punctuation, Truss said, but when people don't understand it, they're missing something that punctuation adds-the sense and the sound.

Truss acknowledged the influence of technology on the written language.

"We're now getting accustomed to reading from screens," Truss said, "but if it trains us so we can't read from a page, I would be quite worried about it."

If people become too accustomed to reading from screens, then those in the future who are trying to read print will feel like those trying to read the Rosetta Stone, she said. People will become frustrated with books because they won't be able to point and click.

Truss had promised to share good news before concluding, but cheerfully told the audience she'd been lying.

"One thing is that the rules of the apostrophe can be learned in about five minutes," she said.

To illustrate her point, Truss told students how she'd done some movies where she pointed out misplaced or missing apostrophes while walking along the street. By the end of the day, the cameramen working with her would also point them out.

By then, "I've realized I've completely ruined their lives," she said.



Copyright Brigham Young University 18 Nov 2008