June 29, 2004
The Clumsy Grammarian
Louis Menand delivers a furious storm of rabbit punches to the throat of Lynne Truss, author of the recent hit grammar book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," which, it turns out, has its own share of problems:
"The first punctuation mistake . . . appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma . . . The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons . . . About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes."
What at first seems like a vindictive and perhaps jealous bit of dismemberment quickly and unexpectedly turns into a nice enough discussion of the phenomenon of writerly voice and its origins - a discussion which I found interesting from my own perspective as a funny person who struggles mightily (and fruitlessly) to be a funny writer. But yeah, the real juicy stuff is in the first three paragraphs.
Posted by sleepnotwork at June 29, 2004 01:24 PM
Comments
Voice. Blech. The bane of insecure writers. I'm constantly plagued by the fear that even my best work is bland and anonymous.
Posted by: mallarme at June 29, 2004 01:58 PM
It's a problem I definitely still have with my fiction, but I think I've trounced it in my nonfiction work - thanks, in large part, to blogging. It's helped me to access the loose, conversational portion of my repertoire (sp?), which I can then plow back into my more serious stuff. Actually, it's a phenomenon that might itself be worthy of a post.
Posted by: sleepnotwork at June 29, 2004 02:45 PM
Whereas I prefer to be stilted and grammatically, painfully correct.
Posted by: mallarme at June 29, 2004 02:53 PM