bloodygranuaile

I borrowed June Casagrande’s The Best Punctuation Book, Period from a girl at my office, and so far, it is indeed the best punctuation book I have found. The first half breaks down every punctuation mark in English, with one chapter devoted to each, and covers nearly every conceivable way each one can be used. As you would expect, the chapter on hyphens is the longest. It’s easy to navigate, as each chapter has a gray tab with the mark in question in the outside margin, making it easy to find the mark you’re looking for by thumbing through the book. The discussions and example sentences are clean, clear, and easy-to-follow, and breaks down how the usage varies by the four major publishing styles (news, book, academic, and scientific). For thornier questions, the author also put together a Punctuation Panel of expert editors, who all give their opinions, and the book discusses on what issues the panel is split and along what style lines (if any), etc. The back half of the book is a giant alphabetical reference table of punctuated words and phrases, marked with little icons for each style they apply to. The author has a light touch in terms of voice, but most of the book is “meat” with very little in the way of asides or jokes. This is exactly as it should be, though—it’s really a reference book, and it has come in useful for me on several occasions already.