Amusing. Pretentious. British. It shook my confidence, until I realized that I knew all of this from the get-go, and have intentionally been ignoring it for the sake of art. I write like I think, and I think in text. Defying convention has always been my strong point, after all.
Even then, I think I do a better job at writing in English as it is meant to be written than most people, and I can’t deny that it was gratifying to read a book by someone even more hung up on the finer points of language than I. It really put things back into proportion for me.

t“Having grown up as readers of the printed word (and possibly even scribblers in margins), we may take for granted the processes involved in the traditional activity of reading – so let us remind ourselves. The printed word is presented to us in a linear way, with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of the words in their order. We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding. Holding the book, we are aware of posterity and continuity. Knowing that the printed word is always edited, typeset and proof-read before it reaches us, we appreciate its literary authority. Having paid money for it (often), we have a sense of investment and pride of ownership, not to mention a feeling of general virtue.

tAll these conditions for reading are overturned by the new technologies. Information is presented to us in a non-linear way, through an exponential series of lateral associations. The internet is a public “space” which you visit, and even inhabit; its product is inherently impersonal and disembodied. Scrolling documents is the opposite of reading: your eyes remain static, while the material flows past. Despite all the opportunities to “interact”, we read material from the internet (or CD-roms, or whatever) entirely passively because all the interesting associative thinking has already been done on our behalf. Electronic media are intrinsically ephemeral, are open to perpetual revision, and work quite strenuously against any sort of historical perception. The opposite of edited, the material on the internet is unmediated, except by the technology itself. And having no price, it has questionable value. Finally, you can’t write comments in the margin of your screen to be discovered by another reader fifty years down the line.”

First off, my “inner stickler” would like to point out that it should be “CD-ROM”, as it’s actually an acronym for “compact disc- read only memory”. “Internet” should be capitalized, even though common usage has recently dictated otherwise.
Second, didn’t she just write an entire book about how editing itself is a crapshoot and you can’t really put your faith in it too much? We’ve all seen typographical errors in books; even Truss mentions them somewhere around the beginning of the book.
However, I think her thesis is sound. We are seeing a general decay, not only in the quality of the language, but in the quality of the minds which experience and produce it. The Internet has many useful research outlets, but for the most part, it goes one step further in making media something which affects us, and not something which we effect. Odd, considering that the entire concept of self-publication should do just the opposite. I wrote a good rant about this once, but I think it’s been lost to the selfsame Internet by which it was inspired.

Except for Strunk and White’s guide, this is probably the most famous modern grammar book ever written, and it’s funny to boot. The author knows how disliked grammar sticklers are, so she starts off making jokes at her own expense. From there, she gives amusing examples of how punctuation changes the meanings of sentences, which is where the title comes from. By then, you’ll be sold on her overall message: correct grammar is important. The concluding chapter reveals what probably prompted her to write the book: it’s a rant about the decline of grammar and especially punctuation in the Internet age. Mind you, the book was published in 2003, before texting was in vogue and before Twitter even existed.

And now that I’ve mentioned Twitter, I want to share a cautionary tale. This book makes such a compelling case for good grammar, it prompted me to correct someone on Twitter. Note that I said, “someone,” as in one person. I did not appoint myself Grammar Cop of the Internet, though I was accused of it. I just thought a particular mistake was marring an otherwise important message, so I suggested its author edit the post. As I should have predicted, I caught flak for it. Errors in print literature are one thing, I was told, but on Twitter, where messages are usually punched in on phones with autocorrect, errors should be overlooked. So the moral of the story is that if you read this book and want to improve your own grammar and usage, the book will have accomplished its goal, but don’t try and correct other people. You’ll just put them on the defensive. The best we sticklers can hope for is that our own hyper-edited posts will, without necessarily being noticed for it, keep our collective conversation from sinking further.

I had read about this book on the Internet; it was hailed as wildly funny and cleverly written. When I decided to look into it, I was surprised to find it was shelved with the nonfiction books. I figured such a humorous book would naturally have to be fiction. It was like when I found out The DaVinci Code actually was fiction. With all the talk on those early-morning shows about it and with people taking it so seriously, I honestly thought it was some guy’s research, not a novel.

It was pretty darn funny in plenty of places. For example:

"The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler [one who adheres strictly to rules of punctuation]. The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands for “it is” or “it has”. If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has” then what you require is “its”. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that 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 to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."

SO TRUE! Ha!

Besides being an entertaining read, I learned quite a bit, too. I had forgotten about certain apostrophe rules and there is lots about the history of punctuation that I’d never thought about nor realized. Also, it was interesting to read from the British point of view.

I also learned that, when it comes down to it, once you learn a few basic rules, punctuation becomes a matter of personal style. Sure, changing the punctuation can certainly change the meaning of something, but many people are doing quite all right grammatically.

Okay. All that being said about the book, I couldn’t read more than a few chapters at a time, though it was very readable (despite its erudite tone). This is because the whole “zero tolerance” thing about bad punctuation would really start to irk me. Yes, I roll my eyes when I see 5 Buck Pizza advertising “all toppings ‘free’” as though they are quoting themselves. And I HATE when people think that “plural equals possessive” and just slap on an apostrophe whenever a word ends in “s.” But a lot of rules Truss harps on are, in my opinion, inconsequential. The Two Weeks Notice thing got a little out of hand, I thought, because it really was an obscure apostrophe rule — and I’d much rather people leave OUT apostrophes then throw them in when they’re not needed, wouldn’t you? Also, with all the talk she does of how punctuation has changed — even in the past century — to be a “stickler” in the age of the Internet is hardly worth getting into a fuss over (she does say “let’s not get into a fuss over this” at one point but then proceeds to get angry about emoticons. And I love emoticons! :-) )

Also, this book seemed useful and entertaining to me because I think I have a pretty solid handle on most punctuation rules already. If you don’t know how not to use a comma “like a stupid person,” that “rule” (which is defined mostly by limited examples) is not going to be much help. A reference book this ain’t — go pick up a style guide instead.

EVERYONE! I HAVE A QUESTION:

When you read to yourself, that is, not aloud, do you hear the words in your head? Does the punctuation affect how you hear them? Does it change, as it were, your mental intonation, the cadences of your inner voice? Does it tell you when to pause, when not to pause, how long to pause, and when to stop completely?

It does mine. And hence why I have never understood why people have trouble with of punctuation (Actually, this isn't quite true: I can understand to a large extent people having problems with apostrophes and even hyphens, and whether to use single or double quotation marks is something with which I grapple daily). But FULL STOPS, commas, ellipses, dashes, and even the dreaded semi-colon: what's the deal, world? Is it really that hard? Can't you just listen to the words in your head and just know which punctuation mark to use?

But seriously, am I alone in this ability? I thought everyone could do it. But evidently not, I guess. Or alternatively, I am a snob who reads too much. Incidentally, I remember a time (back in year eight) when I didn't know how to use the semi-colon, but I seemed to develop the ability spontaneously. Why doesn't this happen to everyone? But anyway. Punctuational musings aside and on to the book.

I had to re-rate this book from four stars to three. Somehow I didn't find it so funny the second time I read it. The humour seemed forced, and formulaic (I'm a proponent of the Oxford comma, in its place, by the way). Perhaps linguistics has spoiled me. One year of rabid left-wing hippy pot-smoking free-yonder-children-from-the-shackles-of-modern-education descriptivist linguistics lecturers has cured me (almost) completely of any lingering signs of prescriptivism (for all you who remain unconvinced, Stephen Fry and Language Hat will tell you why descriptivists have more fun).

In any case, I've seen curses rained upon Lynne Truss for her 'smug', 'self-righteous' 'linguistic snobbism', but she's a sweetie at heart, I believe. For all her grouchy, unconvinced attempts to paint herself as a not-too-prescriptive-prescriptivist (if that isn't an oxymoron), she's clearly just a language lover (to hyphen or not to hyphen?) at heart. Observe:

"... it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don't know the difference between "who's" and "whose", and whose bloody automatic 'grammar checker' can't tell the difference either. [hear, hear! Fucking grammar checkers.:] And despair was the initial impetus for this book. I saw a sign for "Book's" with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft [sic; I would have said mineshaft:]. I know that language moves on. It has to... But I can't help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight."

And no, it's not just the Cherry Orchard reference that makes my heart go boompity-boomp. No matter how many linguistics lecturers I have, no matter how many blog posts written by celebrities advocating descriptivism I read, I will still understand, even if not share, Ms Truss's sentiments. It's the same feeling of sadness I feel when I contemplate the word 'awesome' and how it can never really encompass all that it used to. The same feeling of tragic loss I feel when I realise that the phrase 'the stuff of magic' is actually kind of funny these days. The same half-smothered regret that is inspired within my soul as I cast around desperately for a synonym for 'random' that doesn't make me sound like an idiotic teen.

It's just nostalgia, pure and simple.

I thoroughly enjoyed this short, funny book about British punctuation. The author had a wonderful sense of humor and used it throughout the book. This was a quick read, with sections on the:

1. Apostrophe
2. Comma
3. Quotation Marks (single and double)
(Now I understand why I see punctuation in and outside of quotation marks; British place outside while the American custom place inside.)
4. Colon, Semicolon and Interjections
5. Dash, Exclamation, Question, Italics, Underlining...
6. Hyphen
7. Emoticons and other stuff
(The author does not think too highly of using emoticons. She indicates such use shows poor word usage to convey meaning; therefore, needing to supplement with an emoticon.) Uh-oh. ;-)

Each chapter opens with a brief history, current practice in both American and British cultures and some include debates from various groups on correctness. All have humor and examples of right and wrong usage.

I have to share this letter. It is on pages 9 & 10 and is the same letter, but the punctuation is placed differently; thus, altering the meaning--drastically. Check it out:

Letter #1

"Dear Jack,
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can be forever happy - will you let me be yours?
Jill

Letter #2
Dear Jack,
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn! For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we're apart I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours,
Jill"

According to Lynne Truss, I'm a "stickler". I've been known to spend a good hour or more obsessing over the placement of a comma, a semi-colon, a hyphen, a dash. Are my brackets formed correctly? Have I left my sentence hanging on a cliff-edge with a poorly placed dash?

Even worse is the feeling that occurs when coming across such a cliff-edge while reading; a stomach lurching queasiness that something doesn't feel right, and if only that editor had paid a little more attention we wouldn't be in this mess!

I've been told off by my (dyslexic -I really can be an awful person) partner for rearranging his commas when in fact all he wanted to know dammit is if necessary was spelt right (something I'm admittedly rather less certain about than the placement of those poor little punctuation marks).

I won't even start on the state of the average Facebook post or blog comment. Besides, Lynne Truss covers it all so well in this book.

I no longer feel alone.

But seriously now, the poor apostrophe is being so mistreated - can this book be made essential reading in schools? It's fun, easy to read, explains clearly and humourously, and would make far superior reading to most dull textbooks. People might actually start punctuating their (not "they're") sentences in ways that don't make us punctuation sticklers want to weep.

I am also very, very aware of the potentially contentious Oxford comma in the previous paragraph - not to mention petrified that in all my above ranting I've left a mark out of place and will rightly be in a great deal of trouble for it later.

Originally posted here.


Stop me if you've heard this one before:

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I'm a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

This joke, which appears right at home as a filler on a page of Reader's Digest and hardly calls for a round of badum tish, has become a classic illustration of the importance of correct punctuation since the publication of the bestselling book that made it famous several years ago. The book in question is Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. “So, punctuation really does matter,” the book says, “even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.”

I'm a self-styled grammar and punctuation stickler, but I'll be the first one to admit that the chances of a black-and-white, primarily herbivorous bear-like animal entering your business establishment or even your home, eating your burger and fries, firing gunshots in the air, then exiting as though what it just did was perfectly normal on account of an extraneous comma in a reference book that transformed a pairing of a simple present tense transitive verb (eats) and its noun-phrase direct compound object (shoots and leaves) into a series of simple present tense habitual verbs (eats, shoots and leaves) are practically nil. Translation: Don't panic. Unless pandas stop being complacent and go beyond cutely eating bamboo shoots and leaves and cutely sneezing to their mothers' surprise in YouTube videos by developing the advanced facility to read and the even more advanced ability to recognize ambiguities caused by grammatical faux pas, we don't have to worry about them taking our favorite food and endangering our precious lives. But I stand firm like the sarcasm-denoting temherte slaq (although I'm in no way being sarcastic) in supporting Truss's (yes, that's an apostrophe and an s) proposition that we pay attention every now and then if not ideally all the time to proper grammar and punctuation. I told you I'm a stickler.

“Sticklers, unite!” is Truss's battlecry, and its reverberations are felt throughout the book. She is, of course, calling for grammatical sticklers like her to band together and counter the decline of punctuation, which may or may not be the decline of civilization itself. For those who don't know what a grammatical stickler is, Truss gives a pretty accurate definition:

Grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. Honestly, what an annoying bunch of people.

Indeed, Truss, not unlike her stickler friends (myself included), can be so annoying and ruthless as to say,

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. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

Apparently, I'm no average stickler, or else I'd be guilty of multiple homicide. Thank God.

With playful chapter titles like “That'll Do, Comma” and “Cutting a Dash,” Truss puts forth both a brief history of punctuation and a straightforward punctuation guide in Eats, Shoots & Leaves. She considers, not without humor and self-reference, the versatile apostrophe (which greengrocers tend to violate in their signs for “FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLE'S”), the ubiquitous comma (whose appearance has been likened by Nicholson Baker to “the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiralling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas”), the intoning question mark (of which Gertrude Stein was not a fan), and the snooty semicolon (which Donald Barthelme thought was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly”), among other common punctuation marks. She also mentions the rise of the punctuation mark-based emoticon and, in the manner of Roger Ebert pointing the finger on the growing popularity of e-books for what he perceives as the present generation's underappreciation of The Great Gatsby and 10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories (It took me great restraint not to put an Oxford comma between Toasts and and.), says that the Internet—you know, that place with all the grammatically challenged but deadly cute feline creatures—and text messaging are partly responsible for the widespread mistreatment of the subtle art of punctuation.

Truss is a prolific print and broadcast journalist hailing from England, and Eats, Shoots & Leaves is decidedly British, retaining its British English conventions in its American edition. But Truss, rather scathingly, makes sure to point out a few important differences between American and British English punctuation terms and rules, with which the very British Lord Voldemort himself agrees:

You say "parentheses" while we say "brackets"—but to people who call an apostrophe "one of them floating comma things" it doesn't matter very much. They are unlikely to spot that American usage
interestingly places all terminal punctuation inside closing quotation marks, while British usage sometimes "picks and chooses". (Like that.)

All the same, whether you're on this side of the Atlantic or that, whether you're inclined to write, “A woman, without her man, is nothing,” or “A woman: without her, man is nothing,” and whether you uphold the Oxford comma or not, there's something to like about and plenty to learn from Truss and her trigger-happy panda.

Lynne Truss pulls off the impressive feat of pumping about 20 pages of expository writing full of enough hot air to go into orbit (or at least top the Bestsellers list for several weeks).

I could probably write a book of equal length (a fluffy and yet tedious 204 pages) going into what a disorganized mess this book is, but I'll spare you. Instead, here are three reasons why you should save yourself the criminal $17.50 this book costs.

First, Truss comes across as such a pretentious, self-important jerk that it makes the reading often unbearable. Take this little nugget from page 104:

"To this day I am ashamed of what I did [her response to a pen-pal, both in eighth grade:] to Kerry-Anne (who unsurprisingly never wrote back). I replied to her childish letter on grown-up deckled green paper with a fountain pen. Whether I actually donned a velvet smoking jacket for the occasion I can't remember, but I know I deliberately dropped the word "desultory", and I think I may have used some French. Pretentious? Well, to adapt Gustave Flaubert's famous identification with Emma Bovary, "Adrian Mole, age de treize ans et trois quarts... c'est moi."

I don't speak French, and she leaves this line, pretentiously, untranslated, so I'll have to give her the benefit of the doubt. However, she does not seemed to have learned much from this unrepentantly asshole experience (note: she goes on to use poor Kerry-Anne four more times for her examples) because she spends the entire book essentially trying to tell the world what to do. You might wonder to what end. High standards? A love of literature? No, just her own need to sound sophisticated and manage other people's business. She attempts to gloss this over with an ill-fated attempt at humor, which I'll address next.

Second, she is just not funny. I generally love British humor and I'm familiar with a fair amount of British comedy movies, shows, and writing. I think she must have produced the least funny attempt at humor in British publication in the last 100 years. Her jokes are based on a shared sentiment of self importance, not joy of the language. Furthermore, she tries to come across as appealing to everyone and treating her targets with cautious respect, but she ends up just taking cheap shots at greengrocers, teenagers, and the illiterate (fear of losing language to the barbarians). That's the sickening part. Couple that with her tedious recurrent references to her being single at at age 48 (at time of press), her lack of stereotypical teenage fun ("when other girls of my age were attending the Isle of Wight Festival and having abortions, I bought a copy of Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage"), and her repeat references to the same stale jokes (Sir Roger Casement "hanged on a comma") and you get a long, tiring read. Her style is an attempt at tongue in cheek, but she really just can't pull it off.

Finally, the book does not even achieve what it aims to. That's impressive for a book pumped ten times the size of its meaningful contents. Truss's real issue seems to be dissatisfaction with lowered standards by the public. She lumps improper punctuation in with poor grammar and phonetic spelling, and in the process she looses sight of her original aim. Poor writing, she assumes, is due to primarily to ignorance; she deplores shorthand writing for text messages, but fails to consider the utility in that context (she doesn't criticize court stenographers using official shorthand). Furthermore, she seems to interpret lax writing as a sign of social, and perhaps moral, decay rather than personal standards for what matters. These days everyone accepts, at least I believe, that the internet is filled with lazy, disorganized writing. I hold most all my own writing to high standards, including this book review, because it matters to me. I don't think it makes much sense or does much good to blow off steam about the masses' lazy writing on the internet. There's no clear thesis and no clear argument. That's the death call for expository writing and defeats the entire purpose of writing the book. The book fails as an educational tool and cannot be redeemed on its humor or otherwise.

I've always had high standards with writing (grammar, punctuation, spelling, style), but having high standards is different from being anal. Truss would have benefited from revisiting The Elements of Style (to which she pays a passing nod at the end) and thoroughly edited her book on everything besides the punctuation, especially the organization. Clarity, flow, and interest would go a long way.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is strictly about grammar usage, not quality of writing (which was in fairness, expected). I did not learn as much from it as I took from On Writing Well, for example. This book was on my To-Read list for a long time. I acquired a copy through a sale last year, thinking it would worst case, be good as a refresher since my work involves a large amount of writing, and best case, teach me something new.

It was somewhat informative, sort of entertaining given the topic is punctuation, and relatively short, although best digested in pieces (in my opinion). I’m generally a fan of the Oxford comma and I enjoyed reading about why one shouldn’t be set on being “for” or “against” its use.

While I don’t regret reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I have to say new information gleaned was limited. Some of the chapters were well organized but others felt scattered. I feel like there are better and more current resources to consult for grammar and punctuation, however, I can appreciate the general information and that it was highly regarded back when it was first published - A generous 3 stars.

This is how I know I'm a real English teacher - I have a shelf dedicated to books just about English. The history of English, the uses and misuses of English, and even the history of the alphabet we use. This is something I never expected to have in my personal library, that's for sure.

But that's all to be expected; I'm an English teacher, and people like me are supposed to read books like this. It's professional development, or something. The weird thing about this book, a book dedicated to punctuation, of all things, is that it was popular with people who weren't English teachers. Everyone was shocked by how well it sold, the author included. A book written as kind of a primal stickler scream somehow struck a chord with the general reading population. Perhaps there is some hope for our species after all....

The reason it sold well, of course, is that it's well-written and entertaining to read. Far too many books about language are written by dusty intellectual Linguists who exude smugness with their impenetrable jargon and are completely inaccessible to the general public. I have those books on my shelves as well, and nothing this side of a double shot of NyQuil is as good at getting me off into slumberland. Ms. Truss, however, writes like one of us. She's an ordinary person who loves her language and who just snaps every time she sees a sign like, "Apple's - $1". I share her pain.

The book is a well-mixed combination of history, usage and style. The tiny marks that make the written English word behave the way it does have come to us along a remarkable number of paths. In the last millennium or so, marks have been added, changed and removed over time as necessity dictated. One of her fears (and the impetus to write this book) is that we may be changing English to a new form that requires less of that rigid, form-fixing punctuation.

Or people just haven't bothered to learn.

As she notes throughout the book, punctuation is one of those things that few people ever really get to learn. Our English teachers give it a once-over in elementary school, and then we never get a review of it, so we spend most of our lives just throwing around commas and apostrophes and hoping we get it right. More often than not, we don't. And we're afraid to ask anyone, lest we look like ignorant yobs.

But to master punctuation means more than just being a pedant and a nerd. Heavens, no. Mastering punctuation means controlling your language, which is controlling your thoughts. The vast difference between a sentence like, "The convict said the judge is mad" and "The convict, said the judge, is mad" should be enough by itself to illustrate how important proper punctuation is. In a language like English, so dependent on rhythm, timing and stress, punctuation is the substitute for our voice. It tells us when to speed up and slow down, which points need to be stressed and given special attention, and which points (like this one) can be safely disregarded, if one so chooses.

It would be very easy for Ms. Truss' obvious frustration with the misuse of punctuation to overwhelm her and poison the book. Admittedly, she does at one point put together a kit for those who would be punctuation guerrillas and risk prison to set the world straight, but by and large she stops short at advocating actual lawlessness.

Ms. Truss understands that punctuation abuse isn't something that people do intentionally - it's largely a matter of ignorance, and she wants to help. What's more, she's funny. For example:

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

Every section in the book has sharp and clever humor, a description of something as simple as a comma made in such a way that you find yourself laughing out loud on the train.

So, if you've always wanted to know about how to use a semicolon, or you're not sure if your commas are in the right place, or if you've ever driven someone to madness by dropping an apostrophe into a possessive "its" - and you know who you are - then this book is the one you need. Enjoy.

4.3 stars. I read this book from cover to cover, which I know that's probably not normal--I have the impression most people would use it as reference book. I was subbing for another teacher and he had it on his desk, and so I picked it up and started reading and the rest, as they say, is history. I happen to be someone who finds punctuation scintillating. I took a little off the rating because Truss's writing style is, let's face it, indulgent. But her lovely way of making punctuation come alive--the history of it, the evolution of it, the psychology behind it--truly earns her a place in the Grammar Nerd Hall of Fame.

Jesus, to the thief on the cross:
a. Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in Paradise.
b. Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.

The original biblical manuscripts didn't have punctuation, so which is it, a or b? Entire theological constructs could be affected by commas. And as both an amateur Bible scholar and theologian and an amateur grammarian, I have to say that pleases me to no end.

"The Punctuation Murderer has struck again."

Writing a review for this book makes me nervous. I can imagine Lynne Truss sitting with a bold Red Marker and clicking her tongue as she read this. Putting a cross here; making a circle there.

If I were to speak in terms of Pop Culture, this book will remind you of Amy Santiago from Brooklyn 9-9; and Sheldon Cooper from TBBT. If you were a part of the editorial board of the school magazine, or chose Creative Writing as an extra Curricular Activity over Eco Club or Chess; you're going to love this book. You'll be proud if you're a stickler; if not, you'll at least understand why sticklers find it impossible to ignore mistakes. Why a misplaced apostrophe makes their ears go red; why an ill paced comma makes their heart cry. Fun fact: you'll understand why the book is named 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves', which seems a rather odd title for a book enlightening you about the right usage of punctuation. This book is hilarious. You'll laugh at the mistakes people make, or how little an effort goes into printing headlines for National Newspapers. You might be reminded of some past mistakes you may have made in punctuating your sentences and you'll learn to laugh at those, after the initial shame, of course. The last bit about how e-mails and text messages have led to subpar communication standards and inadequate use [or lack] of punctuation in conversations; formal or otherwise, breaks your heart a little. How the written word may not have the same power as it used to years ago is...

When you're reading a piece of Fiction, you get attached to the characters and lost in the storyline. However, this book engages you all the same. It is just 200 odd pages. I had been reading 10 pages each day, for the last 3-4 days. I am not at fault- I just didn't want to finish reading it. It is that good!