Judging from the tone of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss most assuredly has had at least one apoplectic fit over the decline of syntax on the internet. I don't mean this in a bad way, of course. I think anyone with any respect for the written language has gotten a headache from seeing something like "LOL HaxX0rz!!1!!" in increasing frequency on the computer screen. Most of this primer focuses on the basic yet insidious mistakes with a wry sort of humor that one will either appreciate or denigrate with something on the order of "get a life!"
Truss, however, is not the most anal-retentive grammarian no matter how much you read into her anecdotes. That honor is reserved for the library patron who checked out the book before I did and penciled in corrections.
I will have to say that personally, I side with following grammatical rules. Without them, words would be strewn pell-mell across the page and no one reading will be able to make any sense of them. It's not so much order but clarity. A misplaced comma would be a terrible thing in an important sentence, festering misunderstandings and creating court battles.
My feelings on punctuation:
Apostrophe--My major pet peeve is people who have absolutely no idea how to use it in possessives and plurals. They think everything is interchangeable. It isn't!
Comma--I'm more lazy about this one. I usually use it whenever there's a pause in speech. I'm a little more fanatical about the Oxford comma though. In a series such as apples, oranges, and pears I always put the second comma which is after the word oranges. The entire thing looks a little funny to me if it isn't there.
Semicolons and colons--I use them whenever I feel like it. Maybe I should be more strict with myself about their usage and stop inserting commas wherever a semicolon is more correct.
Dashes--I probably use too many of them even though I think it contributes to my writing style (whatever that is).
Periods and quotation marks--In this weblog, I try to follow the British rule rather than the American one simply because it makes more sense. If I had a sentence that said Harry saw a "UFO". I would write that rather than Harry saw a "UFO." The idea that a period always goes inside the quotation is daft. Clearly, the period ends the entire sentence and not the quotation mark.
*Any grammatical errors in this post are unintentional.
