The New Well-Tempered Sentence reviewed by Denise Noe
In this slim volume, Karen Elizabeth Gordon makes learning the rules of punctuation fun as only she can. She deals with the basics in chapters about exclamation points, question marks, and periods. She explores the often frustrating and confusing intricacies of comma placement in a suitably lengthy chapter. She takes on the uses and abuses of semicolons, colons, dashes, quotation marks, italics, parentheses, brackets, slashes, and apostrophes.
What’s more, she does it all with a witty flair informed by an imagination that has been fertilized by a rich combination of classic literature, fairy tales, folklore, and legends. She displays a special penchant for mixing humor and horror. The New Well-Tempered Sentence can be a delight to the eye with its many engraved illustrations of scenes as disparate as the devil prodding at some denizens of Hades, a woman in Grecian-style garb playing a triangle, and a most delightfully jarring man-birdcage combination.
In her introduction, she writes wryly of the roles played by punctuation marks as in the written word, “punctuation fills in for the clues we receive face to face.†She further notes, “However frenzied or disarrayed or complicated your thoughts might be, punctuation tempers them and sends signals to your reader about how to take them in. We rarely give these symbols a second glance: they’re like invisible servants in fairy tales – the ones who bring glasses of water and pillows, not storms of weather or love.â€
In her chapter on the exclamation point, she observes that they “come in handy when one is at a loss for words, or when one has the words but wants to give them added bite, whack, fire.†She also notes that the exclamation point’s “overuse has been discouraged, castigated as schoolgirlish, sophomoric, bodice ripping, puerile, purple prose, infra dig.†In that last statement lies what could be a negative aspect of The New Well-Tempered Sentence and that is Gordon’s tendency to get carried away by her own cleverness. Her imagery is brilliant but it can actually detract from the purpose of the book by distracting the reader from learning the rules of punctuation. The New Well-Tempered Sentence would not be the best book to give someone for whom English is not a native language as a guide to proper punctuation because they might be confused by the very complexity of the sentences Gordon writes.
As a guide for youngsters, The New Well-Tempered Sentence is a mixed bag. They also might be confused by some of it but the upside is that the oddball quirkiness of it could induce them to actually read this book and perhaps even re-read it while more prosaic books on punctuation are likely to rest unopened on their desks.
People who like arresting imagery and need a punctuation handbook ought to get a copy of The New Well-Tempered Sentence, as it is a pleasure to refer to this book for guidance.
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