Punctuate your emails - Press Release Bradford University

I was schlepping about on the University of Bradford intranet earlier [trying to find out some details about interantional students for some colleagues] and came across this . It's awarning to us all, though clearly no barrier to becoming a writer [see last paragraph]!

So Eats, Shoots & Leaves... clearly has a point. I must admit I am not surprised. I sometimes read stories out loud to my wife and occasionally it is really hard to achieve fluency because the punctuation doesn't exist or doesn't help as much as it could. Then I notice that I do sometimes end up reading to myself certain passages a number of times because it is hard to work out the syntactic relationships without punctuation. Part of the secret of good writing is to realise that, without intonation, ambiguity increases. Therefore we have to compensate by more careful attention to word order and punctuation to increase the clues for the reader.

The interesting thing is about capital letters to start sentences -Jonny Baker, you have been warned!