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

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

Lynne Truss, an English grammarian is bloody fed up with sloppy punctuation.

Does that sentence leave you feeling confused, irritated, or angry? Do you feel you have to second-guess the author of the sentence, forced to ascertain whether s/he was writing to Lynne Truss or about Ms. Truss?

But that sort of thing is almost the norm these days, on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, we Americans have been struggling for years with FRESH DONUT'S DAILY and Your Server: "MILLY" -- not to mention the archy-and-mehitabel school of e-mail that neither capitalizes nor punctuates and reading through this kind of sentence really gets confusing i think it does at least do you too?

Turns out that even the British--including the elite "Oxbridge" inteligentsia--are wildly ignorant of punctuation's rules and standards. Lynne Truss, an English grammarian and author of EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES, is bloody fed up with it! So she wrote this handy little book that is ever-so-correct but not condescending, sometimes savage but not silly, full of mission and totally without mush.

Think of Truss as punctuation's own Miss Manners, a combination of leather and lace, with maybe a bit more emphasis on the leather. (She advocates forming possees to paint out incorrect apostrophes in movie placards.) But her examples of bad punctuation serve a purpose: bad punctuation distorts meaning. EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES includes numerous hilarious backfires of punctuation -- statements and missives that use the exact same words but convey totally opposite messages due to inappropriate punctuation.

Do commas go where they go for breathing, as the do-it-naturally school of non-grammar so many of us were exposed to would have it? Or were they for Medieval chanting or, more analytically, for grammar? Truss explains that it's a mish-mosh of all three, and proceeds to make useful sense of it all. Along the way she confesses she would have gladly borne the children of the 15th-Century Italian typographer who invented Italics and the forward-slash.

With its blend of high dudgeon and helpfulness, Truss steers the reader through the shoals of possession and apostrophes, quotations (British use is a bit differerent from North American, but only a bit, and she notes the difference), the useful if forlorn semicolon, the mighty colon, the bold and (mea culpa) overused dash and other interrupters like parenthesees and commas.

It's important to note that Truss, while something of a true believer, is a believer who lives in the 21st Century. She does not advocate turning back the clock to the 1906 version of Fowler's MODERN ENGLISH USAGE; she is not a snob; she does not overwhelm us with technical terms of grammar and punctuation for their own sake. Just good, common-sense English prescriptive lessons in grammar. People who know they don't know their stuff will learn the right stuff there. People who felt that "the rules" have somehow become archaic in the last thirty years will be happy to see that there are still rules, and while they have become more fluid and pragmatic, they haven't changed inordinately. "It's" still means "It is" and "Its" is still a possessive: "It's a wise publisher that knows its public," say.

Best of all, the teaching is conveyed with wit, bite, and in a snappy tome easy to carry and inexpensive. I'm a former English teacher and I couldn't help but learn and laugh. Highly recommended.

Oh, John Updike? He uses comma faults all that time, that's a sentence like this that splices main clauses together with a comma, maybe using semicolons or starting a new sentence would be better. For us mere mortals, though, standard punctuation fits the norm: once we become world-famous, then we can punctuate at will.


Incredible: An Entertaining Punctuation Manifesto   April 12, 2004
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
62 out of 66 found this review helpful

"If there is one lesson that is to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation." Perhaps that is hyperbole, but there is never a dull moment in _Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation_ (Gotham Books) by Lynne Truss. Surely the book will not be the sensation it was in Britain, but it is witty, informative, and entertaining; you can't ask for more from a punctuation manual. And if you do not yet think that punctuation is important, you will after you see all the misunderstandings a little comma can cause. Take the peculiar title, which is from a joke: A panda goes into a café, orders a sandwich, eats it, takes out a revolver, fires it into the air, and goes out. When the waiter calls to ask what is going on, the panda plunks a badly punctuated wildlife manual onto the table and growls: "Look me up." The waiter finds the entry: "PANDA. Large, black-and-white, bear-like mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." Oh, let's have one more. There was an American actor playing Duncan in _Macbeth_, listening with concern to the battle story of a wounded soldier, who cheerfully called out: "Go get him, surgeons!" Misplaced comma; it should of course be: "Go, get him surgeons!" Another story related here, a true one, shows that a comma can literally be a life-or-death matter.

The book is zero tolerance indeed. Truss says it doesn't matter if you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice, "If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve ..." and she lists some ghastly punishments. Such militantism surely qualifies her for the Apostrophe Protection Society, a real organization that (along with Truss) is horrified by commercial signs that announce "Antique's" or "Apple's". The recent film _Two Weeks Notice_ gives her recurrent fits. She wants to know if they would have called it _One Weeks Notice_. She suggests that we enlist in the apostrophe war, arming ourselves with correction fluid, stickers to cover superfluous apostrophes, and markers with which to insert omitted ones. But best of all, she gives, simply and generously, the rules that will guide one in any apostrophic situation. Plus there is history. In Shakespeare's time, the apostrophe only indicated omitted letters, as it still does in "doesn't." Then in the 17th century printers put it in front of singular possessive "s," and in the 18th they put it after the plural possessive "s," and here we are.

You can turn to this little volume for guidance on the dash, hyphen, colon, semicolon, and more. The rules are here. American readers should note that theirs is a reprint of the British edition, without changes to spelling or punctuation. Often Truss mentions the differences, but she would vehemently deny that this shows that punctuation rules are arbitrary. Punctuation "... is a system of printers' marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium." The conventions evolved slowly, in conversation between printers and readers. Truss worries that printing will decline in our e-age. A printed book has been edited and fussed over, but e-mail often does not even bother with capital letters. Truss thinks that since punctuation represents an effort of a considerate writer to guide a reader into a correct interpretation, the lack of e-punctuation has lead to clumsy explanations, like "Just kidding!" or even "JK!" having to be added to get a tone across, or the (to her) grievous incorporation of her beloved punctuation into emoticons or smileys. "Punctuation as we know it... is in for a rocky time," she says. But her book is a call to sticklers like herself: "I am all the more convinced we should fight like tigers to preserve our punctuation, and we should start now." This delightful style manual has been turned into a manifesto by an author in love with her subject.


Ms. Truss's Losing Battles   May 15, 2004
H. F. Corbin (ATLANTA, GA USA)
32 out of 34 found this review helpful

Lynne Truss writes a wickedly funny treatise on the death-- if we, the faithful who care about apostrophes, are not armed and ready to fight the barbarians-- of punctuation as we know it. Of course, her dilemma is that only people who care about correct punctuation are the ones who will read this fascinating book. Those who are most guilty will not or cannot read her.

But for those of us who read this book there are wonderful tidbits. For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that We have to dismount from an idea and get back into the saddle again at every parenthesis while the writer Gertrude Stein found question marks the most uninteresting of all punctuation marks. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the exclamation point (as it is known in America) is "like laughing at your own jokes." My favorite image from the book is that of the semicolon that "quietly practises the piano with crossed hands."

For those of us who care, Ms. Truss gives a good review of the rules of punctution. She discusses thoroughly the correct use of all forms of punctuation, from the apostrophe to the hyphen, and compares the differences between British and American usage. She also discusses the blight that e-mail messages have brought on us all. "I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing, and doesn't even qualify as typing either: it's just sending. What did you do today? Sent a lot of stuff."

I fear that punctuation problems are worse on this side of the pond than they are in England. I attended a black tie event recently for over 300 people in which words large enough to be read from the back of the dinning hall were projected on a huge screen behind the speaker. The apostrophe was used over and over to express the plural, rather than the possessive of words. I felt as obsolete as a rotary telephone.


For Sticklers in a Pickle   June 6, 2004
A.Trendl HungarianBookstore.com (Glen Ellyn, IL USA)
37 out of 40 found this review helpful

"Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" by Lynne Truss entertained me. I learned a few things, too.

Truss takes to task the errant punctuation found through common language. She even finds problems in Amazon.com reviews. I cannot disagree; my own reviews are littered with errors. She cites a review of Hugh Grant's movie "About a Boy". The reviewer, like so many of us, did not proofread his work, and left his shame available in review form.

While claiming not to be about class distinction, in the British sense George Bernard Shaw meant to reduce in "Pygmalion," she still comes across as arrogant. There is no way to avoid this poise of authoritative injunction. Punctuation is a perfect science with imperfect applications. We readers tolerate (or completely miss) errors because we understand both the message and the messenger.

Truss' examples are humorous. Her writing is bright, with all British overtones. These overtones were resident in the original English edition, and the copy published in America is verbatim. It works to highlight the accidents of poor punctuation pervasively nicking our writing. By selectively altering a comma here and there, she shows how meaning is sometimes entirely changed. That's good to remember.

She is clear in the beginning to say this is not a grammar book. Grammar is not punctuation, she correctly says. However, she misleads the reader into believing this is a punctuation book. It's not. It is about punctuation, with many stories, anecdotes, tales and lessons teaching proper punctuation. The book never closes in on being purely a list of 'dos and don'ts'. It is valuable for that, especially as her style welcomes the reader more than the standard reference book on the topic. She encompasses punctuation as the basis for her book, but Truss never lets the method arrest its entertainment value.

Intelligent readers for whom the use of language matters will indubitably learn something.

Throughout are citings of the kinds of punctuation mistakes forwarded in e-mails by editors to their friends.

This book is a primer, at best, but completely incomplete. We are taught quickies in the usage of apostrophes, commas, colons, ellipses, semicolons, dashes and, in her estimation, the rarely used hyphen.

Who should read "Eats, Shoots & Leaves"? Smug freshman copyediting students and their pretentious high school counterparts, full-time professional editors who need to remember they are not alone, anyone who makes a living joining letters on a page, and junior high school English teachers who need never forget that even their best efforts will not teach every student. Most of all, as I'm confident Truss would agree, amateur book reviewers like myself should read this; we could learn the proper use of a semicolon.

I fully recommend "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" by Lynne Truss. It will not replace your AP, Chicago, MLA or APA stylebooks, but it will add to your enjoyment of their much-needed use.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com


Entertaining romp through English grammer, uh, grammar   June 24, 2004
Charles Sutherland (Indy, IN USA)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

I remember a long time ago seeing a headline in a paper that read "Milk Drinkers Turning to Powder." This is the kind of English that really sets off Lynne Truss. I saw an interview with her on television, and while she had a sense of humor, and that is apparent from the book, she also had a very serious side, and I was sure that for certain grammatical errors she would not hesitate to shoot and leave!

The title of this book comes from the kind of problem that people can encounter in the difference between spoken language and written language. Being a fan of poetry, I am very aware of the difference between spoken words and written words on the page, and what a difference simple intonations and voice changes can make. Punctuation and spelling can make a big difference, too. Is it here, or hear? Here here! or Hear! Hear! There are lots of arguments for the need for correct grammar and punctuation, and there are lots of pieces in here that talk about the history and misuse in the past of punctuation in key times.

This is a very British book in many senses, and some of the American rules of grammar are different, but it is still fun to read and see what happens with the differences. Truss has a dry wit and this comes through most of the time fairly well. There were times I did laugh quite a bit, and times I copied things down to email to friends.

This is a fun book. You won't want to leave it behind, eating or shooting.