The textual revolution

Punctuation

Sir, – Further to Rodney Devitt’s lament for the dearth of quotation marks in the current batch of Booker books (Letters, October 18th), the current batch of authors have been using mobile phones for 25 years, and have simply forgotten the true meaning, in the linguistic and literary sense, of the word “text”. – Yours, etc,

PETER DECLAN O’HALLORAN,

Belturbet,

Co Cavan.

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Sir, – There is a simple solution available for those readers who are exhausted after reading some books that have abandoned quotation marks around dialogue. Listen to them as audio books. It is not a recent innovation. I managed to complete Ulysses with the benefit of the 1982 RTÉ radio drama production on compact disc. – Yours, etc,

DAVID LOUGHLIN,

Rathmines,

Dublin 6.