Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.

Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this means we should be very careful what we use it for.

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.

The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.

In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.