My wife is the Events Coordinator for the Parents’ Association of our childrens’ school. This means that I’m effectively involved too, doing anything that involves touching a PC instead of the ‘phone. This week I had to deisgn and print some tickets for their Summer Ball. Being short on both time and patience (and unpaid) I cut/pasted the text from somewhere else, threw in some clipart, and hit Print.
Unfortunately I committed the cardinal sin of not proofreading, and the tickets went out on general release with the title “Parent’s Association Summer Ball”. [*] (For the less-eagle-eyed, the apostrophe is in the wrong place – it should be “Parents’…”.)  This is embarrassing from a professional writer, but it used to be that I could have gotten away with it. Most people wouldn’t even notice, and those that did probably wouldn’t care (let’s not forget, this is a local, home-grown event, and the tickets are disposable, not family heirlooms…).
Unfortunately, Lynn Truss, with her [excellent] book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, has turned half the world (or at least the 10 million or so who read the book) into Punctuation Nazis. Consequently my wife handed out the tickets only to find herself harangued by some two-bit soccer mom who clearly has nothing better to do in-between running little Tarquin to violin lessons than to scour the work of volunteers with a magnifying glass looking for something to bitch about. I wouldn’t have cared if she’d had a go at me. I’m a regular Master of Quick Wit and Ready Repartee when it comes to a withering retort. But my wife is ill-equipped to defend herself, barely knowing an ellipsis from a parenthesis when it comes to punctuation. Which means that I get it in the neck twice when I get home – once for getting it wrong in the first place, and once for making her look stupid for not knowing her possessive plurals…
So thanks, Lynn. Punctuation used to be a nice, esoteric world that only we professional writers understood. We could sneer at the mistakes of others, safe in the knowledge that no-one outside our own clique would notice our own mistakes. It was fun. But now that you’ve made everyone an ‘expert’, it has taken the fun out of the whole thing. Now I’ll have to go and find something else to feel superior about.
[*] Before anyone else starts on me, I know that convention used to be to put the full stop (period) inside the quotation marks, but modern usage now places it outside.
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