More than Writers

  This week I have been reading about the finer points of punctuation in Lynne Truss’s excellent book, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” [1] . Like her I groan inwardly at the greengrocer’s shop blackboard offering ‘potatoe’s’ and the nightclub poster proclaiming that ‘Thursday night is lady’s night’ (lucky lady). Ms. Truss admits to brandishing a cut-out apostrophe on a stick once in front of a cinema which was showing the Warner Brothers’ film   Two Weeks Notice . Creative punctuation has become the order of the day. As Father Ted might say, “Down with this sort of thing!”. As writers, of course we cherish the tools of our calling: vocabulary, punctuation, grammar … Nonetheless, I was intrigued to read this quotation by Dylan Thomas: “The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.” In the same way, could it be that the spaces between our words might open windows of opportu...