Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. I've got it on audio CD, but I think the book would be better. Advertised as 'the zero tolerance approach to punctuation'. I learned a couple of things from it.

Without any doubt or hesitation - The Art of Punctuation by Noah Lukeman - Oxford University Press - ISBN 978-0-19-861454-8.

I quote the opening lines:

"This is not a book for grammarians. Nor is it one for historians. They can turn to Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves or a host of other excellent punctuation books written for them over the ages. This book is for the audience that needs it the most and yet for whom, ironically, a punctuation book has yet to be written: creative writers."

Excellent.

Lukeman will have you pondering such questions as "why did Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver lean heavily on the full stop? Why did William Faulkner eschew it? Why did Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville rely on the semi-colon? Did Emily Dickinson embrace the dash, Gertrude Stein avoid the comma? How could punctuation differ so radically between these great authors? What did punctuation add that language itself could not?"

Go to:www.theartofpunctuation.co.uk and check it out.

Glad you found my suggestion useful. Enjoy. It really is a good read in its own right. All the best with your writing.

A very useful book and far quicker to get to the points we all need - plus stuff on formatting manuscripts and the like.

Try an extract:

How to handle punctuation in dialogue "Suck it up, say thank you and move on."

The Spelling and Grammer - Common Errors to Avoid section I've found particularly helpful.

I once had a friend whose ex sent him a note, in which they called him a looser! I think the note lost the serious point they were trying to make. JD