Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?

Texting is a fundamentally sneaky form of communication, which we should despise, but it is such a boon we don't care. We are all sneaks now.

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.