A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots & leaves."
(Back cover of Eats Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss, 2003)
In the US, National Proofreading Day was celebrated on 8 March to encourage accurate writing. Does proofreading deserve such an accolade? Lynne Truss author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Book of the Year, 2004) argued for the preservation of punctuation, yes those dreaded marks – apostrophe, bracket, colon, dash, ellipsis and others all come to mind. Using a combination of humour, history and examples she shows the chaos that misplaced or no punctuation marks can cause. The above joke is such an example – pandas, in fact, eat shoots and leaves of the bamboo.
Another example she gives compares two sentences:
A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
The meanings are worlds apart. It is ambiguities like these that justify working with proofreaders.
Proofreaders are our champions of accurate recording of our thoughts and memories.
Contact me to see how we can make your next project a work of word art:
Tel: +44 787 239 6609​ Email: sandra@sandramewint.com Website: sandramewint.com Linktr.ee/sandramewint