Review of Lynne Truss's 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The first time I read ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ by Lynne Truss was over a decade ago. I had written about it on another one of my blogs here.

I was thrilled that a book on punctuation was so darn funny, but I was also pleased with myself for having discovered an ‘error’ in the book. On the cover, it said ‘The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. As an enthusiastic copy editor, I insisted it should be ‘The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’. Then I found numerous other word zealots like me had discovered this very ‘error’. Now, of course, a search on the Internet for this ‘error’ on her book throws up articles both in favour of and against the presence of that hyphen. Not too long ago, I had a heated exchange of words in a Reading Group I belong to, with a 70-year-old man, no less, about this. To be fair, I hadn’t known his age, else I might have been predisposed to be more polite.

Anyway, coming back to the book, when I re-read it now cover to cover, I can appreciate Lynne Truss’s efforts to quote and comment on so many writers who have put pen to paper their thoughts on punctuation. Her bibliography runs into four and a half pages. She quotes from books on punctuation written in the late 1800s to past the millennium. She quotes classic guides like Fowler’s The King’s English along with more obscure ones. She has referenced articles from The New Statesman and The Express along with short stories on punctuation like Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Exclamation Mark’ from 1885.

She has outlined the consequences of mispunctuation through the now common example – A woman, without her man, is nothing vs. A woman: without her, man is nothing. She enlightens us about the greengrocer’s apostrophe( CD’s, DVD’s etc.), reminds us that there are seventeen rules for comma usage, and even quotes a poem on punctuation from Cecil Hartley’s Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing(1818), which by the way, she calls “rubbish”.

As Truss states in her introduction, “So if this book doesn’t instruct about punctuation, what does it do? Well, you know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation.” And she couldn’t have put it better. She definitely achieves what she sets out to do. I want to read every one of the books in her bibliography now!

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