Lukeman, Noah. A dash of style; the art and mastery of punctuation.

LUKEMAN, Noah. A dash of style; the art and mastery of punctuation. Norton. 206p. c2006.0-393-32980-3. $13.95. A

Lukeman is a literary agent and president of Lukeman Literary Management Ltd. He has written two books that are part of the curriculum in many writing programs: The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile and The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life. A Dash of Style is another such book, the kind that writers of creative prose should read and apply to their own work. Lukeman's purpose is not to present a usage manual, delineating the various correct uses of the comma, for instance. His book is much more than that. He discusses, with samples from literary works, how writers use punctuation for artistic purposes. In his chapter on the semicolon, for example, he illustrates how it can "balance sentence length and rhythm."

In the introduction, Lukeman writes, "As a literary agent I've read tens of thousands of manuscripts, and I've come to learn that punctuation, more than anything, belies clarity--or chaos--of thought. " Throughout the rest of the text, he explains how writers can accomplish that clarity with careful use of punctuation. Claire Rosser, KLIATT

A--Recommended for advanced students and adults. This code will help librarians and teachers working in high schools where there are honors and advanced placement students. This also will help extend KLIATT's usefulness in public libraries.