Review: Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

by Chriss Cornish published: August 4, 2010 1 Comment

This Book Is About

A panda walks into a cafe. It orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires a shot into the air. “Why?”, the waiter asks. The panda gives him a wildlife manual and the waiter reads, “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only a mater of life and death.

Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now “txt msgs,” we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. It is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are.

If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From George Orwell shunning the semicolon, to New Yorker editor Harold Ross’s epic arguments with James Thurber over commas, this history makes a case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

Sticklers, unite!

My Thoughts On This Book

Are your effects affected? Have you agonized over whether it should be 90s or 90′s? Do you stay up late at night wondering what “to quote” with commas that may be inverted? Do you not care but like to laugh at grammar sticklers who can laugh at themselves?

This is the book you should read, then.

With all the humor of a ranting friend, Lynne Truss discusses the history of our punctuation system from its medieval origins to the grammar arguments of academics and newspaper folk. Truss also alternately explains and gnashes her teeth over proper modern usage.

The book’s dedication reads:

To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby precipitated the first Russian Revolution

Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a fun, quick book to read whether you are a grammar stickler, curious about where to put that comma, or just want something interesting to read. Many of my friends enjoy this book and several of them have borrowed it.

A warning, though. The author is British and it is occasionally just British English she’s addressing. She’s typically clear when she is talking about the British dialect and not the American one, though.