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Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance [or should that be 'Zero-Tolerance' with a hyphen] Approach to Punctuation (2003) by Lynne Truss. A hilarious and readable (5 sunny hours) book on punctuation by newspaper writer and radio commentator Lynne Truss.

Are you interested in the use and a partial history of the comma, apostrophe, semicolon, dash, ellipsis, etc? This is the book for you.

Truss shows how correct punctuation clarifies meaning, with lots of examples (selected to be funny) that show that incorrect punctuation leads to unclear or even incorrect meaning.

Beware, however. Grammarians tend to be bossy persons, and despite Lynne Truss's sense of humor, she is passionately bossy. What saves the book is her own inconsistent use of portions of punctuation. She is also unsound on the subjunctive.

Favorite review: Stephen Poole's from Saturday December 13, 2003, in The Guardian, archived on-line (mid-2004) in http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews. He closes with:

"The most alarming thing about Eats, Shoots & Leaves is perhaps that, while you begin it smiling in benign horror at the excesses of Truss's obsession, you may end it brainwashed into trying to outdo the author herself in forensic quibbling. I found myself asking, for instance, whether the subtitle presents some problems. Doesn't a zero-tolerance approach to punctuation properly mean that one should not tolerate any punctuation at all? Also, according to Truss's own preference for hyphenating adjectival compounds, there surely ought to be a hyphen between 'Zero' and 'Tolerance'. Otherwise it could be read as saying something obscure about how we should tolerate zeros being used as punctuation marks. You see how this kind of thing is catching? I could go on, but blessedly space forbids. "

Some books:

(07.12.2004)

• Finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance [or should that be 'Zero-Tolerance' with a hyphen] Approach to Punctuation, the hilarious and readable (5 sunny hours) book on punctuation by newspaper writer and radio commentator Lynne Truss.

(07.01.2004)

• Louis Menand's "Bad Comma" review in the recent New Yorker complains about inconsistent punctuation in Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

(06.29.2004)

• Finished (and see our comments) Lapsing into a Comma: A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print -- and How to Avoid Them, Bill Walsh. An opinionated, humorous commentary and style guide.

Related pages: Buddhism. Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own. Books on: How to Write Anything. Learning Spanish.

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