Lynne Truss

Author: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

LYNNE TRUSSEats, Shoots & LeavesGotham Books (Penguin)

Lynne Truss is a self-proclaimed stickler for grammar. And it's hard to write a review of her book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, without feeling overly self-conscious about proper usage. Luckily, someone else edits my words. Also luckily, Truss has no problem with beginning sentences with conjunctions.

Right from the beginning, Truss fully acknowledges that grammar exists to facilitate usage and to communicate effectively. This, coupled with an ample dose of humor, puts the reader at ease and makes Eats, Shoots & Leaves the most enjoyable grammar book ever.

If you're looking for a manual with every single little rule laid out for the sake of reference, you might want to refer to a handful of other books on the topic. However, if you're looking for an exploration of grammar that clarifies a few major points and leaves you with a more intuitive understanding of grammar so that you don’t have to constantly search through reference books, then Eats, Shoots & Leaves is for you. (It should also be a good bit of fun for other sticklers to read. Even if you know everything about punctuation, or think you do, this book is so much fun, you'll revel in being in Truss’s camp.)

Sections on the apostrophe, comma, colon and semicolon, dash, hyphen and miscellaneous punctuation marks give a healthy dose of background and explication on each mark. And don’t worry —she doesn't neglect quotation marks, the question mark, period and exclamation point. She also weaves in the purpose of grammar and usage with anecdotes and a nice dose of her personal attachment to grammar told in a charmingly faux-haughty, self-deprecating manner.

Truss also addresses the ever-evolving nature of grammar, which serves to simultaneously frustrate and placate sticklers. She presents a few examples of grammar rules that have more than one form of acceptable usage. For instance: the serial comma. Some camps want a comma before the "and" in a list, thus: peas, spinach, and broccoli. Others prefer no comma, arguing that the "and" serves as the final comma, thus: peas, spinach and broccoli. Both ways are currently correct and can create minor wars between stubborn people who don’t know that they're both right.

She also acknowledges that there are differences between proper American English grammar and British English grammar. Because Eats, Shoots & Leaves originally was published in Truss's native London, the American edition was left with original British English grammar intact.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is filled with excellent examples that drive home Truss's points, including versions of sentences and epistles that have strikingly different meanings depending on the punctuation used in them, such as:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.A woman: without her, man is nothing.

When framed in this manner, the necessity of appropriate punctuation makes perfect sense. After all, grammar is all about making sense. That's why it exists: to help your writing more easily convey meaning.

Truss isn't as concerned about the infinitesimally minute details of punctuation as she is about clarifying the overall picture to the general public. She simply wants commas in the right place, apostrophes where they belong, and for people to know the difference between "its" and "it's" (which, thankfully, I now do).

By the way, I suppose you'd like to know about the title. It comes from a joke regarding an informational pamphlet about pandas that is improperly punctuated. Take a look at it, and you'll see what she means.