Language Sticklers Unite for Eats, Shoots & Leaves
By Leah Stratmann June 3 , 2004 Issue

It’s not often that a book about punctuation comes along with the readability of a novel; but in Lynne Truss’ book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, the author provides terrific information on punctuation with hilarious anecdotal evidence of the decline of the English language.

Truss refers to herself as a stickler and claims there are lots of us who cringe when seeing the misuse of language by people who should know better. The author was apoplectic about the movie Two Weeks Notice and thought about running about England with a huge apostrophe on a stick. You see, the proper title should have been Two Weeks’ Notice, but apparently nobody at Warner Brothers was aware of the error or even cared about it.

If you are a stickler who stops dead in your tracks when reading or seeing something blatently wrong, this book is for you. It is heartening to find the book on so many bestseller lists and newspaper columnists doing stories about it. It’s the humor that draws one in, I think. This is the caption I read that dragged me to the bookstore:

As an editor, I thought there was probably something to be learned by reading a non-fiction book on punctuation. Like many, I often question the use of comma here or a semicolon there. In the first chapter, I was somewhat shocked to see the periods, exclamation points and question marks outside of the quotation marks. Later, the author explains that we Americans put them inside, while the Brits prefer them outside. It is just one of the many peculiarities between two countries who nominally speak the same language, albeit with quite different spellings on a number of words.

The author has done her research into punctuation with some detail. She’s funnier and the information easier to understand when she straightforwardly sticks to the here and now, She cites numerous examples to support each punctuation mark she lovingly covers and she has extensive chapters on the apostrophe, the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the dash.

She is a pedantic with wit, imparting information in a chatty communicative style. She deplores the decline in language and recalls everyday signs she sees like Bob,s Pets and reserves a lot of antagonism for those who do not know the difference between it’s and its. She shakes her finger at educators and journalists alike for laxly allowing language and lack of grammar to flourish unchecked. She claims this is not an instruction book about grammar, merely an excuse for sticklers to continue to love grammar.

”Hence, two vastly different meanings to the same exact words, because of punctuation. Truss says that one writer has defined punctuation as the traffic signals of language; they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

In England, periods are called full stops.Language, as with everything, is evolving and changing. While some punctuation has become optional such as a comma before the and in a list, typically the rules remain the same. She explains that one uses a comma if it would be proper to use the word and. Thus a sentence such as He is tall, blond and handsome needs a comma after tall because it would also be proper to use the word and. The comma before the and in a list is now optional and she blames Americans, in particular journalists, as we have apparently been the ones to discard it.

This book isn’t for everyone, but if you want to learn a few new things and laugh at the same time, I recommend it.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Gotham Books, 204 pages, available at local bookstores.

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