Later today I will probably drop by a bookstore to see if they have a copy of this. In the review there are quite a few things I agree with,
she is often persuasive, as on the tendency of lazy writers to reticulate their sentences with dashes: "The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive; it enhances conversational tone; and...it is capable of quite subtle effects. The main reason people use it, however, is that they know you can't use it wrongly -- which, for a punctuation marker is an uncommon virtue."Bravo. In the book she analyzes how different writers have used punctuation, and she notes that some writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, use punctuation incorrectly to their benefit.
Evelyn Waugh cut commas to convey the clipped dispatch of upperclass speech: "You see I wasn't so much asking you to agree to anything as explaining what our side propose to do."There are also many illustrations about how some writers (Beckett, Tom Wolfe, and James Joyce) break rules such as the comma splice, always ending sentences with periods, and not using exclamation points, respectively.
Typically I stick with fiction for my leisurely reading, but I am occasionally drawn away to the fun that can be had with a nonfiction book, especially when it analyzes how writers deal with conventions.
