Ogden Nash’s Introduction to Richard Armour’s On Your Marks:

How much punctuation is just enough? E.E. Cummings sometimes used too much, Archy too little, both with prodigious results. But those of us who are neither unorthodox geniuses nor cockroaches will do better to observe the rules if we wish our written words to mean what we intend them to mean. I don’t know how many fat, greedy poodles or lazy, supercilious Persians have come into a handsome sum at the expense of a worthy and impoverished rightful heir because of a comma misplaced or omitted in a will, but I’ll wager more than there are apostrophes in this sentence.

Now that this simple guidebook is available there is no excuse for losing your way in the tanglewood of punctuation. Richard Armour is a master of his craft — ingenious, witty, and many-faceted — whose verses I have admired and envied for many years. Here he has given to one long known to editors as the most reckless and least punctilious of punctuators a swift and painless education in this essential phase of his profession. The rhymes are terse and memorable, the reasons clearly stated and easy to comprehend. No longer shall I ignorantly employ a — for a : or (\,) for [\,]. And I am happy to find that there is still a use for the *, which I thought had become obsolete after the court decisions involving Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer.

Richard Armour’s delightful little book of shrewd advice is just the thing for today’s generation of aspiring writers and not too late, I hope, for yesterday’s.