Book review: Punctuation..?

Reading time: About 1 minute

This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles of interest to writers. Today I discuss the book Punctuation..? published by the UK company User Design…

When I very briefly worked in book publishing many years ago, colleagues told me that stores sold more books in December than all the other months of the year combined.

I don’t know if the existence of Amazon has altered that rule (as it seems to have changed so many others), but I suspect the December imperative is what drove publication of the attractive but very brief (35-page) book Punctuation..?

I must confess: I don’t understand the title. Why is there a partial ellipses (missing one dot) eliding into a question mark? And why is there a question mark in the first place? Surely the author can’t be doubting the value of punctuation, which provides the sole justification for his own book?

And why didn’t he make the book longer, with more examples? I’ve always found the 95-page Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Eager, the Innocent and the Doomed by Karen Gordon to be funny, infinitely useful and quite short enough.

One thing I did appreciate about Punctuation..?, however, was the illustrations. They were both charming and amusing.

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