The indispensable guide to all points of punctuation and presentation for computing, engineering, medical and scientific writers who need to express complex ideas succinctly and accurately.

Laugh your way to punctuation perfection with this pocket-sized paperback compendium of the hilariously illustrated #1 New York Times bestselling series. Clever side-by-side illustrations show how punctuation placement makes a huge difference in the meaning of a sentence. Imagine this without the middle period and the comma: “The king walked and talked. A half hour after, his head was cut off.” Oh no—a beheaded king that can still walk and talk! You might want to eat a huge hot dog, but a huge, hot dog would run away pretty quickly if you tried to take a bite out of him. Scenes from all three of Lynne Truss and Bonnie Timmons’s best-selling punctuation picture books (Eats, Shoots & Leaves, The Girl's Like Spaghetti, and Twenty-Odd Ducks) highlight the important jobs of commas, apostrophes, hyphens, quotation marks, and more in this humorous punctuation primer. “Wordplay or ‘grammarplay’ at its finest.” —School Library Journal

Punctuation Matters gives straight answers to the queries raised most frequently by practitioners in computing, engineering, medicine and science as they grapple with day-to-day tasks in writing and editing. The advice it offers is based on John Kirkman’s long experience of providing courses on writing and editing in academic centres, large companies, research organisations and government departments in the UK, Europe and in USA. Sample material discussed in the book comes from real documents from computing, engineering and scientific contexts, giving the guidelines an immediately recognisable, ‘true to life’ relevance. The advice is down-to-earth and up-to-date. It is clearly set out in three parts: part one states a policy for clear and reliable punctuation part two gives a series of alphabetically arranged guidelines, to be ‘dipped into’ for guidance on how to use the main punctuation marks in English part three contains appendices on paragraphing, word-division and how conventions of punctuation differ in the UK and the USA. Punctuation Matters is the essential guide for everyone who has to write in scientific, technical and medical contexts, with clear explanations on punctuation, what it does and how to use it.

Runner-up for the Reading the West Book Awards

We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the internet, in email, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

Can learning about punctuation really be fun? You bet--in Elsa Knight Bruno's Punctuation Celebration, featuring illlustrations by Jenny Whitehead Punctuation marks come alive in this clever picture book featuring fourteen playful poems. Periods stop sentences in a baker's shop, commas help a train slow down, quotation marks tell people what to do, and colons stubbornly introduce lists. This appealing primer is a surefire way to make punctuation both accessible and fun for kids.

In the workplace, good punctuation is much more than a matter of correctness. It’s a matter of efficiency. Professionals who aren’t sure how to punctuate take more time than necessary to write, as they fret about the many inconsistent and contradictory rules they’ve picked up over the years. Good punctuation is also a matter of courtesy: In workplace writing, a sentence should yield its meaning instantly, but when punctuation is haphazard, readers need to work to understand – or guess at – the writer’s intent. Weak punctuation results in time-wasting confusion, questions about professionalism, and some times even serious and costly miscommunication. Without using the jargon of grammar — and providing 18 common sense principles to live by — Punctuation at Work shows busy professionals exactly how the marks can be used to make meaning clear and emphasize ideas. All the marks are covered, with hundreds of examples taken from today’s workplace. From hyphens and semicolons to brackets and quotation marks...all the way to ellipses (and the eternal struggle between “that” and “which”), this book explains the many ways punctuation makes things plain.