Humorous, educational, interesting. Recommended.

I don't think I "favourite" many non-fiction books but this book was just brilliant! Lynn Truss laments the misuse of our punctuation marks, and the possible future demise of a couple, such as the semi-colon. This book is perfect (or a bit worrying) for grammar and punctuation sticklers. Some of the examples of terrible punctuation use will make you cringe, while others will make you laugh. On top of that, Ms Truss's wit is in a class of its own! There are lots of literary examples of certain writers who abhorred certain punctuation marks, and others who loved them. She also touches on the contribution of the internet to the deterioration of language and what the implications may be for the future (not good!). She does explain the main uses of the punctuation marks for anyone wanting a quick refresher course. I've had to re-read this review a couple of times just to make sure there aren't any punctuation mistakes in it!

Well - I probably enjoyed this short book more than I should have. While my punctuation is not perfect and my reviews always contain typo's that I only spot years later, I still enjoy a good laugh at terrible punctuation.

Lynne Truss has collected some great punctuation faux pas. But more than that, she has provided relatively simple guidance on how to correctly position those commas, apostrophes, hyphens, and the like. (Points for noticing the Oxford comma (used after the and in a list) which I quite like.) I also like the guidance on how to position the full-stop when dealing with quotation marks or brackets (which I know I tend to over-utilise). Of course, I am paranoid now about every comma, hyphen and apostrophe in this review, as it would have been better just to throw some stars at it and not write a review at all than to cock up the punctuation...

Some quotes:
n  

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence.

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If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

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Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?

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I apologise if you all know this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying "Giant Kid's Playground", and then wonder why everyone stays away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)

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Phrases abound that cry out for hyphens. Those much-invoked examples of the little used car, the superfluous hair remover, the pickled herring merchant, the slow moving traffic and the two hundred odd members of the Conservative Party would all be lost without it.

n

5 stars for its reference value if nothing else!

A delightful, informative and satisfying read, especially for those of us who feel the urge to reach for a red pen when confronted with the ubiquitous "grocer's apostrophe". Snappy writing makes it fun, right from the start.

If you're a stickler for punctuation, if you have difficulty using correct punctuation -- or if you just want a good laugh, pick up this book! You will at least want to find out how the title manages to become the punch-line for a joke that begins with, "A panda walks into a bar...."

Alongside Pride and Prejudice, this is probably the funniest book I have ever read! For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone would give this less than 5 stars.

Lynne Truss takes us on a journey through punctuation in such a comedic way, it hardly feels as if you're learning. Each chapter covers the history of a punctuation mark with hilarious anecdotes and examples of misuse, and teaches you the standard rules for use.

She's knowledgeable, passionate, experienced and laugh out loud FUNNY.

I read this last year and as someone who loves words - and punctuation; it was both amusing and informative, in fact I'm making several purposeful mistakes here as I tell you all about how interesting this book was... Yes I really enjoyed this book: and it's insight into the proper use of punctuation! I learnt many things as you can no doubt see from here.

To be serious I must say that this book was enjoyable first and foremost. Secondly this humorous little volume explored a little of the history of the English language. Which is of course something I look forward to exploring at university this year.

While my grammar and punctuation is hardly perfect it tends to on the whole be sound. However I still aim to work on getting all the kinks out so that any 'mistakes' are simply induced from my unique way of phrasing, well, phrases. I wish others around me took the same care because I constantly see mistaken uses of homophones and contractions such as there's theirs; there and they're; and its and it's. In fact I tend on the whole to often humorously correct such misspellings and incorrect uses of language procedures. For instance earlier I commented on how I hate how fair evaders always avoid carnivals and good looking people. And that is why I enjoyed this book. The positive of misspelling will always be the humour I can find in it at least.

If you're like me when it comes to words and grammar odds are you'll like this book. Evens are you might like it all the same.

I have no idea why this book enjoyed the success that it did. It, bored, the pants, off, me frankly.

Amusing book about punctuation. Amazing to think such a read even exists! Although, I am a supporter of the Oxford comma, I do understand Lynne's thoughts on it. I shall agree to disagree. If you love language, and grammar, you'll probably enjoy this book. I did.

4 Stars = Outstanding. It definitely held my interest.

This joke, I think, is fairly well known: a panda after having eaten food in a restaurant, takes a gun and fires a couple of shots into the air before exiting. On being queried by the restaurant owner on his strange behaviour, the panda points to the dictionary entry on himself, which says: “eats, shoots & leaves”. The problems created by an unnecessary comma!

It is this joke that this book takes its title from – though it is not mentioned in this book. However, there are plenty of other examples, some well-known, some obscure, of how punctuation can affect a sentence and turn its meaning completely on its head. Lynne Truss does a fantastic job of putting ahead her case for punctuation; I, for one, am convinced.

‘ , ; : ! ? “ () [] {} <> – ... -

Ahem! See above the stars of this book, taking a bow; the apostrophe, the comma, the semicolon and the colon, the exclamation mark, the question mark, quotes, various types of brackets, the dash, the ellipsis and the hyphen (along with italics). The full stop, though a very important member of the contingent above, is not given special treatment because it performs a self-evident role.

Now the question you ask will be: don’t the others? Well, yes and no. It turns out that we have a fairly good grip of how most punctuation marks should be used – however, most of us (including established writers) are unaware of the nuances. Which lacuna Lynne Truss, self-declared punctuation vigilante, sets out to correct.

After some preliminary cribbing on the sins against punctuation in modern society, she starts with the apostrophe. Here, I felt on safe ground – most of the things she said jelled with me. At least I was not sinning against the apostrophe! Well, she did clear up one long-standing doubt: whether we should add it, when we are writing the plurals of abbreviations (i.e. CD’s or CDs) – apparently, both forms are correct.

When it comes to the comma, however, things get a lot murkier. It seems that there is no hard and fast rule on comma usage, though there are correct and incorrect ways of placing it. As mentioned at the beginning of the review (and through countless horror stories we have heard), an absent or misplaced comma can create havoc with the meaning of a sentence. But what exactly are its functions? The author enumerates six, and after reading them, I was feeling that they were pretty self-evident – before I admitted to myself that I had not thought about it in that way before Lynne told me. She says

...[B]etween the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a “separator” (punctuation marks are traditionally either “separators” or “terminators”) that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom. Commas, if you don’t whistle at them to calm down, are unstoppably enthusiastic at this job.

A very colourful metaphor indeed.

Now we arrive at the two pesky things: the colon, and the semicolon. I never knew exactly how to use these guys, though I had a vague idea – and I must thank Lynne for spelling it all out for me. The way I had imagined them in my mind was as breaks interrupting the vehicle of narrative: you put a comma, and you engage the clutch; the semicolon is a gentle braking; with the colon, you stop the vehicle momentarily; and the full stop brings it all to a grinding halt. It seems that my idea was not very much off: these are indeed pauses, but it seems that there are some rules for using them.

A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician’s assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.

The semicolon, in contrast, joins two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as “and” or “but”, but where a comma would be ungrammatical. It also serves as a “Special Policeman in the event of comma fights” (to see a live example, see the paragraph above the quote).

(Here, I was a bit worried about the dash – I tend to use it in lieu of the colon quite a lot – but the author set my mind at rest assuring me that it is perfectly legitimate. In fact, the dash is more “dashing”: it can subvert the meaning of the sentence in subtle ways, as shown in the example below, from Byron:

A little still she strove, and much repented,
And whispering “I’ll ne’er consent” – consented.

Lynne Truss discusses the exclamation mark, the question mark, quotation mark, ellipsis, brackets and the dash all together as these are the guys which give the text its sparkle – “cutting a dash”, to use the author’s own term. I loved the way she explained these rules as they appeared in a sort of story, where Lord Fellamar almost succeeds in spoiling Sophia’s virtue, to be frustrated at the last minute by the Squire Western.

Before winding up, I would like to mention two more things the author touches upon:

1.tThe use of italics. Though overkill would grate upon the reader’s nerves, apt use can enhance the power of narrative no end. In one Agatha Christie novel, the whole mystery hung upon where the emphasis in a sentence was placed: “she wasn’t there”, “she wasn’t there” or “she wasn’t there” (and this example is mine!).
2.tThe under-used hyphen. I could very well have written underused in the previous sentence, but I decided to take the advice of Lynne and use the cute little connector. And it is a must in some cases: a little used car is very much different from a little-used car!

So, ladies and gentlemen: punctuation is important. Though I would say that no one should lose sleep over the exact place to put that comma, or whether a colon or dash should be used, one cannot say that sometimes it does not become damn important, as the following sentence illustrates.

Woman, without her man, is nothing. (So say the MCPs.)
Woman! Without her, man is nothing. (The feminists retort.)

We're called sticklers. Or grammar nazis. We know the difference between who's & whose & whom, they're & their & there, the correct plural for words or the fact that some words exist only in either singluar or plural and correctly use the comma, semicolon, full stop, exclamation mark and question mark. And by god, we'll make you know the difference, too! :D

It is so refreshing reading a book like this. Honestly. Many people, as the author correctly bemoaned, don't give a damn, but they should. Everybody should. Lives can depend on it; or at least my sanity (and therfore the survival of whoever made me lose it).

What is especially strange, no, downright scary, is the fact that I know most grammar and punctuation rules better than many a native speaker. Because no, my first language, my mother tongue, is not English. So if I can know this stuff, you can as well. No excuses.
It's not about getting it right all the time, but reading some posts even here (on a literary website, for crying out loud), makes me shudder! Some don't even use the full stop and especially in the English language, where almost every word starts with a minor letter (German, for example, uses capital letters at the beginning of nouns), this is the worst case scenario if you want to know what exactly a person was trying to tell you.
Mind you, English speakers are not the only ones afflicted. Auto-correct and the laissez-faire attitude (yes, I just included a French term, I'm classy that way) on the internet have made sure of that. It's not only the younger part of the populace either.

What I'm saying is: there's a reason for rules and not all rules are bad and if you don't get in gear, I might take the author up on her offer and become part of her stickler militia. *lol*

Truss' tongue-in-cheek style may not appeal to everyone and I don't agree with her about everything. In particular, "zero tolerance" makes punctuation an end in itself, rather than an aid to meaning, which seems back to front. It also makes no allowance for context and audience.

However, she gave punctuation and grammar a voice, and, however briefly, made people think about language, ambiguity and meaning, which is certainly good. Or it would be, if it didn't fuel the fire in the bellies of extreme prescriprivists.

A broader and more balanced book on this and related subjects is David Crystal's "The Fight for English How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...).

Lynne Truss goes into some highly entertaining anecdotes, examples and digressions pertaining to uh, punctuation marks, like commas, colons, parentheses and whatnot. More fun than it might first sound, unless you're one of the globish cabal of punctuation buffs who get all flustered over a winking semicolon.
As for the subject-matter issue of zero-tolerance approach punctuation guidance, I'm much disinclined to adopt a zero-tolerance anything, purely out of rebellious spite. That said, it behooves rebels to be familiarly acquainted with the rules they bend and ignore. Also, there are diverse and amusing punctuation-corrective stickers provided for all you radical sticklers getting into public-sign-policing ops.
But besides being a functional attention-grabber and fielder, and a useful reference at short notice or otherwise, Truss' book is in a wobbly position of achieving cult grammar-nazi classic status even as it loses some of its essential momentum via aging into the current 21st century. While all the excitement over email and text message and "Netspeak" seems hopelessly outdated, what really struck me was an upbeat passage, in the same nettish section toward the end of the book, in which Truss made a spirited plea for disassociating Netspeak from Newspeak, "not least because the key virtues of the internet are that it is not controlled by anyone, cannot be used as an instrument of oppression and is endlessly inclusive ..." - well hi there 2003, and don't we look optimistic today!