PROVO — The following boo-boo was printed on pens during the presidential election: "Student's for McCain."

Whoops. You wouldn't know it from those poorly punctuated pens, but more than one student supported John McCain, even if he did lose. No apostrophe was necessary.

Humorist, best-selling author and punctuation lioness Lynne Truss drew more than 65 laughs during a recent 29-minute speech at Brigham Young University as she shared silly story after funny anecdote about messages botched by misplaced commas and colons.

Some of the laughter revolved around signs, one which really needs a comma after the first word.

"When I see a sign that says, 'Children drive slowly,'" Truss said with a giggle, "I think, well, that's a relief, isn't it? That's a relief. If they're going to drive at all, I'd rather it wasn't to endanger life."

Truss won fame for selling 3 million copies of her book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation."

She isn't a grouchy, old-school scold. Truss is fully engulfed in text messaging and the Internet, which she calls a writer's medium. "We are writing all the time," she said.

Truss simply would like more people to care enough about what they are saying to write what they mean.

"It just makes you sad," she said, "because what you see all the time is the gap between what people intended to write and what they have written. ... It seems particularly a tragedy at this time that people are just happy to send a gist of what they want to say."

For example, a sign at a high school in California intended to honor the school's nickname with this message: "We are the Scots. Who could be prouder?"

Instead, the sign read: "We are the Scots who could be prouder."

Who knows, maybe they could be. Who are we to judge?

Truss laughed along with the audience at the Marriott Center when she recalled a correction printed by a British newspaper after it published this sentence: "The defendant said his barrister had a history of drug abuse."

The correction fixed the error: "The defendant, said his barrister, had a history of drug abuse."

Truss said punctuation isn't as difficult as many believe. She said she could teach anyone the rules about apostrophes in five minutes.

"Punctuation was invented to clarify things, rather than to complicate them," she said. "I always get very defensive, particularly on the part of the apostrophe, when people say it's so complicated, it's so difficult. It's the language that's difficult. Punctuation came along to make it easier, to clarify what's going on."

She conceded, however, that those who fight to improve the use of punctuation in society ultimately will find the battle futile "because the enemy is so vast and hugely ascendant."

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E-mail: twalch@desnews.com