Thursday, August 23, 2007

I've been intermittently reading two books on punctuation:
Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotnik and
Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, which I originally thought was a diet book.
Both are great and both have me thinking about my writing in different ways.

So with these thoughts of punctuation reorganizing in my head, I enjoyed my son's recent punctuation misunderstanding.

I had gathered my children together to declare that they needed to maintain a list all week of the items they keep getting told they need for school, or for upcoming sports and scouts. I would not, could not run to the store every day for one thing at a time. I reminded them that they could list books that they were told they would need. Then I said, "Kat needs 'To Kill A Mockingbird.'"
Kyle was startled. He didn't hear the quotation marks or see the capitalization. It hadn't occurred to me that he didn't know this was a book title. Hasn't everyone heard of this book? Apparently not.
"What?!" he sat up, alarmed. "Why the violence?"
charming huh?
So once I explained it he grinned, "Oh, Suzy needs a bridge to Teribithia and Kat needs to kill a mockingbird."

Have you had any recent misunderstandings regarding punctuation?

5 comments:

Anne said...

We have already killed the bird if you want to borrow it.

just me said...

no, but I loved Eats Shoots and Leaves. I understand she has written a similar book for kids.

MarkEC said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MarkEC said...

Have you seen the Who's on First routine from Abbott and Costello? ( YouTube)

Unknown said...

Heehee, funny! I finally got to finish your post. J was bugging me yesterday when I was here so I gave up.
No such misunderstanding here.