Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

With sales of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" topping three million copies and counting, Lynne Truss is not to be trifled with when it comes to punctuation. Recently, in The Daily Telegraph, she had this to say: "Punctuation is a form of politeness: a writer who includes punctuation is a writer who remembers, considerately, that a reader shouldn't have to do all the work of sorting out what he is trying to say." What would she think of this, then?

Tales of the old west, he said.

Yessir.

Lot of people shot and killed. Why were they?

Mr Johnson passed the tips of his fingers across his jaw. Well, he said. I think these people mostly come from Tennessee and Kentucky. Edgefield district in South Carolina. Southern Missouri. They were mountain people. They come from mountain people in the old country. They always would shoot you. It wasnt just here. They kept comin west and about the time they got here was about the time Sam Colt invented the sixshooter and it was the first time these people could afford a gun you could carry around in your belt. That's all there ever was to it. It had nothin to do with the country at all. The west.

We're in Cormac McCarthy country here and much to the horror of Lynne Truss the master of the Western prose ballad has eliminated all quotation marks from his writing so that the narrative voice and the characters' speech aren't separated anymore. To add insult to the Trussian form of injury, McCarthy also does very nicely, thank you, without lots of the other bits and pieces of punctuation, especially the comma, as we pointed out on 23 July this year. Maybe this makes McCarthy "impolite" but it doesn't detract from his greatness. Of course, Lynne Truss is not pitching her products at the creative writing market, but her readers might benefit if she lightened up now and then and showed them a few examples of the beauty that can emerge when rules are broken. I mean, she will never write a sentence as gorgeous as this: "There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady mix of the same forms burnt and lifeless." Suttree.

Or what about this: "They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such as if they seemed of another world entire. They moved down the valley and turned and moved far out on the plain until they were the smallest of figures in that dim whiteness and disappeared." The Crossing. Case closed.