I love this piece from the Daily Mail. Guerrilla grammar is a force to be reckoned with! As standards of punctuation and spelling continue to fall, it’s nice to see someone taking the laws of good grammar into their own hands. For anyone as pedantic as me, I heartily recommend Lynne Truss’s book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the bible of apostrophe usage. (And yes, according to the book Truss’s is correct.)

While technology like SMS text messaging and instant chat seem to be doing their damnedest to consign basic spelling and punctuation to the dustbin, it’s important to remember that the whole point of grammar is to aid comprehension. It’s not just rules for rules’ sake; it’s about ease of understanding.

Computer skills are vital, but if you don’t know the difference between ’specific’ and ‘Pacific’, as was the case with one student in our office recently, you’re going to look a bit of a plonker. But it’s not just young people I’m throwing the chalk at: you’d be amazed by the number of Oxbridge grads who don’t know that punctuation relating to quoted speech comes inside the quotation marks, not outside.

If you want the ultimate proof of the power of punctuaton, just remember there was a time not so very long ago when a single apostrophe was all that distinguished a mighty global insurance market from a major clearing bank: Lloyd’s and Lloyds. (You’d also be amazed at the number of people in the insurance market who still get that apostrophe wrong. When I worked at Lloyd’s, two easy ways to fail a job interview were to call it a company and to put the apostrophe in the wrong place.)

Good on yer, Stefan!  Read all about his punctuation heroics here.

Written by Adrian Beeby