Love of language lives!

My daughter just gave me the best book. It is all about ... punctuation! Yes, those little squiggles and lines that pop up every so often between the words are making a big splash. It's called Eats Shoots and Leaves, and features a panda on the cover. Just look at what happens if you insert a comma; it changes the whole framework, right? Now, I read. A lot. And I will sacrifice good writing for a terrific story, though I draw the line with Danielle Steele, whose every other sentence begins with "but", thus letting the air out of her balloon and leaving it to lay flaccid on the ground. And some writers are really terrific, like John Irving. Yet, he has this love affair with parentheses that drives me nuts. And Joyce Carol Oates is the queen of the sentence fragment. Emphasis only, Carol! OK, I'm picky. I am also a writer, of sorts, and I notice these things. I deliberately omit the Oxford comma, the one before the "and" in a list of things, thinking it is redundant, and my psych teacher would happily re-insert them. It's a matter of style more than rules these days, except when submitting papers in college. Whatever, I am happily proclaiming myself as a fellow stickler and endeavoring to follow the proper use of the apostrophe in all things. And I want you to know that this whole entry was produced with the use on the British "full stop" in place of that old American "period". So there!