And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.
If it were not for the fact that editors have become so timorous in these politically correct times, I would probably have a greater readership than I have.
I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.
It may be tripe, but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.
I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.
Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.