Grammar guru Lynne Truss is being criticised in the US for alleged bad punctuation, writes John Mullan
The only surprise is that something like this did not come sooner. Write about grammar, of which punctuation is but one elaborate and beautiful part, and you open yourself to attack. You always take the risk that your medium will undo your message.
Write a book whose subtitle is The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation and you invite a little of that laudable intolerance upon yourself. When your book has sold more than 1.5m copies, the invitation becomes irresistible.
As well as its massive sales - a complete surprise to author and publisher - Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves enjoyed a critically friendly reception in Britain. The reviewers themselves liked to be thought of as "people who love punctuation and get upset about it" (the book's description of its intended audience). But now a fellow "stickler" (Truss's name for those who truly care about punctuation) has taken the author of this surprise bestseller to task for her own grammatical failures.
In a long article in the New Yorker, Louis Menand condemns and attempts to anatomise Truss's "strange grammar". So inaccurate or incorrect is Truss's punctuation, he says, that "it's hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax". He continues in the same withering vein: "Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor." Menand writes with the borrowed authority of a magazine that is renowned for its code of "correctness", in matters both of fact and of style. As he explains, "The British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters . . . than Americans are." So British readers are hardly likely to object to Truss's "British laxness". According to Menand, "About half the semicolons in the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes." Unless a semicolon is dividing items in a list, he explains, it should be used only between clauses that can stand as complete sentences. Truss not only flouts this rule, she shamelessly tells the reader that she is doing so.
You can hardly blame Menand for hugging himself when he finds the first mistake at the book's very beginning, in its dedication. Here, he delightedly discovers "a nonrestrictive clause \ is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there." Does he have a point? He feels no need to tell the New Yorker's notoriously literate readers what a non-restrictive (I like a hyphen there, myself) clause is, but, to judge his attack, you'll need to know.
Truss's dedication mentions "the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters". To put it simply, Menand says that there should be a comma after "Petersburg". Without that comma, the dedication is to some striking printers who made the demand, as opposed to some other striking printers who didn't. Only with a comma is the dedication to all the striking printers (as Truss presumably intends).
It is true that the rule about a comma before a non-restrictive clause ("The house, which is Victorian, is dilapidated.") and not before a restrictive clause ("The house that I own is dilapidated.") is there in Fowler's The King's English but is not mentioned in Truss's book. Some of Menand's other points seem less like hits. He complains about a misplaced apostrophe in "printers' marks", but couldn't the printers be plural? He complains of inconsistency. "Sometimes, phrases such as 'of course' are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not." (Would you use those two commas, by the way?) But inconsistency might simply be appropriate variety. He complains that Truss uses parentheses to add independent clauses to the end of sentences (so do I, sometimes).
The New Yorker does not encourage letters of rejoinder, but Andrew Franklin, Truss's editor at her publishers, Profile Books, is happy to answer back. He is not to be outdone in witheringness by Louis Menand. "If you have no sense of humour", Franklin thinks, the success of Truss's book will be a mystery to you. Misunderstanding the purpose of her book, which is not a style guide but an entertaining "call to arms", Menand has pedantically reached for a non-existent rule book. "I think he's a tosser. You're welcome to use that," Franklin remarked when I quizzed him for his views on Truss's antagonist. "I'd never want to spend an evening in his company." Rules in English "are more complicated and sophisticated" than he can dream of, he adds. Good writers can break the rules, provided they have learned them before they break them.
Why should it have so provoked one of the New Yorker's leading writers? "A twisted colon" is one of Franklin's explanations, but he also has a weightier cultural analysis. The attack is "deeply xenophobic". An American critic who is used to his readers having their eyes only on American culture has seen them reach for an idiosyncratic English book for a discussion of grammar. So far the book has sold 800,000 copies in the US, about as many as it has sold in Britain. For the arbiter of matters literary and linguistic in the New Yorker chair, it is, Franklin guesses, just too much.
Menand certainly has one explicit objection to the book's Englishness. He points out that it has not been altered for its American edition, and is "virtually useless for American readers". They order things differently over there. Quotation marks always go outside stops. And the title of Truss's book, according to American grammatical mores, should have a comma before the "&": Eats, Shoots, & Leaves. So are those American readers poor saps, duped into buying a guide to a language they do not write? Franklin retorts that the "trivial differences" between British and American punctuation are mentioned by Truss, who anyway wrote a separate introduction for the US edition.
Certainly it is the case that it is Truss's breeziness, even her happy facetiousness, that has made her book a bestseller, not her description of how to use apostrophes. The book's success is all about it not being a style guide. After all, those style guides are all out there and none of their authors has ever been able to retire on the royalties from even the most helpful. It is the combination of concern with jokeyness, irritating to some, that has attracted readers. Style guides list rules and conventions, but you can actually read Truss's book .
So her confessions that she breaks some rules are all to her purpose. Menand's own article turns into a meditation on the nature and the elusiveness of a writer's "voice", and a voice is what - for good or ill - Truss manages to give you. Menand says that a writer's voice has nothing to do with his or her punctuation, but his own prose has a voice that is certainly, in part, a function of his punctuation. He combines colloquial idioms and contractions with a certain fastidiousness in his use of commas. Funnily enough, this is something Truss talks about in her book. Her chapter on commas begins by examining the famous "clarification complex" of a past editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross. Ross was always trying to get contributors to use more commas and admitted in a letter to HL Mencken that he had "carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here, probably to a point approaching the ultimate". He itched to put in commas wherever he could. Perhaps Menand has inherited the itch, and perhaps it is a matter of taste and not correctness.
- Guardian Service