Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation Lynne Truss Date: 12 April, 2004   —   $12.25   —   Book product page Rating:

I figured that if I was going to write on a daily basis, I should at least learn how to use a semicolon. "Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation", by Lynne Truss did the trick. I had a lot of fun reading this book. Not only does Ms. Truss run through the proper usage of punctuation, but she also gives a brief history of each character. Now that might sound a little dry, but the only thing dry about this book is the author's wit. If you don't read it with an English accent, you're really missing out.

Lynne Truss is a self professed 'stickler' and the introduction sets the tone for the rest of the book. Quoting a banner over a local petrol station that reads, "Come inside for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's," she says, "If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put this book down at once." She goes on to say that sticklers got "very worked up after 9/11 not because of Osama bin Laden but because people on the radio kept saying "enormity" when they meant "magnitude", and we really hate that."

The entire book is full of that type of humor, so you rarely realize you are actually learning something. But in the writing I've done since reading it, I notice that I've become a bit more daring in my use of punctuation. I recently used my first semicolon and it felt sooo good!

In fact, I believe she had people like me in mind when she wrote the book: "...by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll." And "...it is a matter of despair to see punctuation chucked out as useless by people who don't know the difference between who's and whose, and whose bloody automatic "grammar checker" can't tell the difference either.

The English accent is key.

So whether you embrace the Oxford comma or not, and especially if you have no idea what that means, you're going to enjoy this book.