4

Examine the following passage of writing. Break into a list of kernels, and examine the result carefully. What elements of structure make up the passage's style? It will be helpful to do this exercise with one or two other people.

From Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, a work of non-fiction by Lynne Truss (New York: Gotham-Penguin, 2003. Print.). Here Truss is describing the arguments about commas that writer James Thurber and Harold Ross, his editor at The New Yorker magazine, engaged in:

It is pleasant to picture the scene: two hard-drinking alpha males in serious trilbies smacking a big desk and barking at each other over the niceties of punctuation. According to Thurber's account of the matter (in The Years with Ross [1959]), Ross's "clarification complex" tended to run somewhat to the extreme: he seemed to believe there was no limit to the amount of clarification you could achieve if you just kept adding commas. Thurber, by self-appointed virtuous contrast, saw commas as so many upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability. (68)

   


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