And despair was the initial impetus for this book. Even in the knowledge that our punctuation has arrived at its present state by a series of accidents even in the knowledge that there are at least seventeen rules for the comma, some of which are beyond explanation by top grammarians - it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don't know the difference between who's and whose and whose bloody automatic 'grammar checker' can't tell the difference either. ― Lynne Truss, quote from Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Fowler's The King's English in 1906) has been towards ever-simpler punctuation, with fewer and fewer commas but take any passage from a non-contemporary writer and you can't help seeing the constituent words as so many defeated sheep that have been successfully corralled with the gate slammed shut by good old Comma the Sheepdog.” Luckily the trend in the 20th century (starting with H. Commas, if you don't whistle at them to calm down, are unstoppably enthusiastic at this job. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a 'separator' (punctuation marks are traditionally either 'separators' or 'terminators') that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing circling and herding and of course darting off with a peremptory 'woof' to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom. “So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog.

Eats shoots and leaves author