Not so much a guide to punctuation as a history and exploration of the purpose and possible future of punctuation.

The author advocates for rules but also allowing for flexibility, since languages are always changing and evolving.

She uses a lot of humorous examples of how things can be misunderstood without proper punctuation.

It's a fun book if you like writing, language, wordplay and so on.

This book made me angry. It is prescriptivist, which is fine, I guess. I mean - you've got to expect that from a grammar written for popular consumption. But what the author clearly thinks is charming snark just comes across as snideness, and it's impossible to tolerate from someone who clearly has no understanding of linguistics. I don't mind stupidity, but I HATE stupidity mixed with a superiority complex.

Lynn Truss is a woman of wit and sophistication, but unfortunately, as is common to the aesthete, elite, and oligarch, is sometimes hoist by her own petard.

Her explanation of the use of parts of speech was easy to understand, and ran the gamut from basic idea to more complex debates; and to her credit, Mme. Truss tended to stay out of the more heated ones. She also keeps the reader pleasantly amused with both the character of her writing and the literary bent of her many examples.

However, her analysis of the changes in language after the oft-bespoke Internet Revolution was somewhat simplistic. I understand that this is not entirely her area of expertise, and as the a member of the last generation to witness an age without the internet or personal computer, I am sympathetic. However, I still cannot forgive her for failing to come to the insight that this is a fundamental change to the medium as a whole. The future of publishing lies on the internet, along with the rest of our knowledge.

I do not begrudge her the nostalgia and love of books that she has, and with Sony's new paper displays, I would doubt that something like the book will not continue to be available. However, her crude abuse of the interrobang, that young but upright princeling of punctuation, cannot be forgiven.

Totally recommended for writers. Even if all you do is write emails, that means you.

For writers who have taken on larger projects, i.e. books, this lesson in punctuation carries a sting. Lynne Truss says:

“As I mentioned in this book’s introduction, by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal undereducating 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.”

I think this comment is well-deserved. For someone who went to school through that “period of abysmal undereducating in literacy,” I know what she’s talking about. The Lord only knows how we were expected to learn proper punctuation and grammar. Osmosis? Were we supposed to go out into the world and ‘git gud’?

I find it utterly infuriating to hear other writers say punctuation doesn’t matter, that good grammar doesn’t matter, as long as the story idea is sound. No. That’s lazy and disrespectful to the reader. By the way: without a reader, an author is nothing (Gardner, M. Some Book I Wrote About Something). Here’s why we should care. As Lynne Truss quotes, punctuation is “a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.”

Having read this book, I’ve decided to read it every year from now on, to become a stickler and to carry a black vivid marker so I can make corrections to any offending sentences.

Steps off soap box. Exits stage left.

Oh, it’s quite funny too. Which is rather nice in a book about punctuation.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is entertaining, humorous and a quick read.

As someone who grew up speaking German, it was an excellent refresher. It's accessible and easy to understand.

Highly recommended.

I'm the kind of person who can't buy a T-shirt if there's a spelling or punctuation mistake on it, no matter how much I like the design or the message. I'm also someone who is not able to read the way many people do, autocorrecting typos in the process. I see all of them (all right, 99,9% of them). Most of the time it is a curse but becomes very useful when I get paid for spotting these mistakes. With all of this, I used to feel kind of lonely, but then came this book. It is hilarious, elaborate, and gives you the warm fuzzy feeling of reassurance that you are not alone. And not a freak either. Or maybe you are a freak but there’s a whole brotherhood of freaks and you’re warmly welcomed. (There is an organisation called the Apostrophe Protection Society! I’m not kidding! Doesn’t have a militant wing though.)

Apart from this nice feeling and laughing my head off, I also learnt* “the awful truth that, for over a quarter of a century, punctuation and English grammar were simply not taught in the majority of [British] schools”. Which sheds some light on the existence of mugs explaining the difference between there, their and they’re (it is really not that complicated). On the other hand, I remember correcting hundreds of this type of mistake in a thesis, and I still don’t think the author didn’t know how to use the words, she simply mixed up homophones throughout her work. There’s another explanation for their constant mix-up, although they’re easy to differentiate between. See?

If you are a fellow stickler, grammar nazi, whatever they’ve been calling you, read this. It’s not your fault (it’s theirs! - still not complicated.**). You are not alone. You deserve the liberating feeling of knowing this, and some good laughs, too.

* I just couldn’t help myself, it’s such a great way of memorising the difference: https://contenthub-static.grammarly.c...
** Please, don’t take this too seriously.

I have had this little book for many years now and although I don't profess to be an expert in it's teachings, I do still get it out from time to time for a little brush up.
It is surprisingly funny with its many references to grammatical errors. Most certainly recommended for anyone interested in brushing up on their grammar...or just for fun...because it is a lot of fun! ;)

"the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes [] states that a balance exists in nature: “For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an its.” Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall."

I am not a pickled herring salesman!

Lynn Truss, a proud, self-proclaimed snobbish pedant, makes no bones about the fact that her short book, EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES is really an extended essay on pedantry - a style book, a prescriptive grammar, a manifesto, a rant and, perhaps saddest of all, a eulogy - bemoaning the demise of the correct use of punctuation in the written English word today.

As a reader, writer and speaker who, frankly, takes pride in an extensive vocabulary and takes pains to use our magnificent language correctly, I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement as Truss eloquently spoke about the purpose of correct punctuation. She helps us to understand that commas, apostrophes, colons and the other denizens of our pantheon of punctuation marks are aids and signs on a road map for communication without misunderstanding. They are an invaluable assistance to reading out loud with the proper interpretation, lilt and intonation that an author intended in the same fashion as a well annotated musical score enables a musician to interpret music as a composer meant it to be played.

EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES also provides us with snippets of the history of punctuation. I wager that few of us were aware that the apostrophe first appeared as early as the 16th century.

If history and a pedantic rant delivered with a school marm attitude, a baleful glare and a wrathful wagging finger were all we got from a reading of EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES, I'm sure most of us would have yawned in complete boredom and Lynn Truss's novel would not likely have reached the list of best sellers. But, thankfully, EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES is also liberally sprinkled with a very healthy dose of dry as dust British wit, humour and sarcasm that hit my funny bone with a full-sized mallet. One of my favourites was the story of a community group who had built an enormous playground for the children of their neighbourhood and advertised it with the sign "GIANT KID'S PLAYGROUND". To the amazement of the group that had built the facility, it was hardly ever used. Lynn Truss, with tongue in cheek, suggested it was probably because everyone was terrified of meeting the giant kid.

By the way, the much maligned salesman of this review's title is actually a complete tee-totaller. He is, however, a very exceptional pickled-herring salesman! (If you'll forgive my mixed metaphors, a very different kettle of fish, indeed). This witty little example shows how the poor, lowly, and much misunderstood dash can eliminate any possibility of misunderstanding the sentence.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

i Learn,t alot ... about! punctu-ation???"

I was willing to give this two stars but then I hit the chapter on emails. Personally, I don't enjoy being told that internet users are by and large illiterate swine whose only aim is to destroy the sacred holy grail of English language.

Any book starting with a self-description along the lines of 'while other girls of my age were going to festivals and having abortions, I bought a grammar book' sounds like its author is a snob, and Lynne Truss is a proud example of one. The humour gets tiring after a while once she starts sounding like a forty-something desperate to be a cool mum, and the writing feels like she's shouting at the reader in her frantic crusade for proper punctuation. I picked this this book to get a better grasp of punctuation, and that is not what this book does, despite the rosy promises. It builds up a lot of self-righteous steam about stupid peasants (how dare people be uneducated where she can see!!) and then dissolves in heaps of vagueness and contradictions.

A professor of mine in my first semester of graduate school in the U.S. cut off a few points from my term paper because in a few instances I had put a space between a comma and the last letter of the previous word, ignoring my pleas that English wasn’t my first language and that in Persian we actually put a spaces between the comma and the previous word. I had worked a lot on that paper to get all the math and simulation right. Not getting a perfect mark made me mad. It also made me check out a few books on punctuation and grammar. That was in 1997. By the time I read this book in 2003, I already was pretty anal about punctuation and grammar. I didn’t really learn much from this book, but I remember it being clever and funny.