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

Bored with grammar worksheets, spelling games and thick volumes on punctuation? You'll love this humourous, passionate and indignant guide to English punctuation.

This book is a rare find. It is alive with passion and humour, bristling with indignation, brimming with historical anecdotes, easy to read, and...it’s about punctuation.

Imagine that; a passionate, informative and funny book about commas, apostrophes and semicolons.

If your horror of poor punctuation made you shudder when you saw the poster for the movie, ‘Two Weeks Notice’ (Should be ‘Two Weeks’ Notice’, of course), then you’ll love this book. You’ll find a kindred spirit in its author, Lynne Trust.

Or if, like me, you know you should brush up on your use of punctuation, but would rather read a telephone directory than a book on grammar; here’s a book you can really enjoy, and learn from at the same time.

Lynne Truss mourns the loss of basic writing skills. Her blood boils when she sees misplaced apostrophes or the lazy use of dashes. And she’s right. Not sure whether to use a colon or semicolon? Just use a dash – it always seems to do the job.

In addition to explaining the basic ‘rules’ of punctuation, she also explores the art of punctuation, those areas where people just can’t agree. That’s where the passion comes from. Punctuation isn’t just about rules, it’s also about personal style and strongly-held opinions.

In the chapter on commas, she tells a wonderful story of the disagreement between humourist James Thurber and his editor at the New Yorker, Harold Ross. (Thurber used very few commas. Ross added as many as possible.)

“Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living room’?” And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

I read this book is two sittings. It made me laugh. It make me think about our society’s loss of basic writing skills. It educated me, surprised me, delighted me.

I was mailed my copy from the UK, where it's selling like hotcakes. For readers in the US and Canada, it has yet to arrive in the bookstores. But you can place an order on Amazon.com now and have it delivered as soon as it is available.

Highly recommended.

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