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Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Gotham

List price: $19.95
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Average customer rating: 4 stars

Grammar Police

I did like reading about grammar. I love grammar. I love punctuation and I love the English language. As a teacher, I found it entertaining and informative in non-structured way. However, I do not like it when a writer states something like a joke or a particular way of punctuating a sentence and then goes on to explain the whole thing, as though you are a bit daft and would not understand without her interpretation.

The book is a great idea but I began to skim the book about a third of the way through. You might as well...

Delightful!

I never thought that I'd ever find myself in a quiet, public room, sitting by the fireside after an afternoon of skiing, surrounded by other hotel guests, and suddenly laughing out loud while I read a book about, of all things, punctuation. However, despite the seemingly dull topic, I found this short little gem of a book to be wonderfully written and, at times, absolutely hilarious. Lynne Truss has a sense of humor that would probably enable her to make almost any topic you can think of funny. In this particular case, if you know the English language and you love to read, you'll find "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" to be truly delightful!

As delightfull as the joke abot the panda!

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a delightful, light hearted look at the good, the bad and the simply incorrect of English grammar, told in straight forward, funny, personal style. Anyone who cares about written English must read this brief yet detailed discussion of the when, where and why of placing commas, simi-colons and the dreaded colon. Lynn Truss abley demonstrates her knowledge of the subject as well as the language used in discussing it. A small book packed with valuable information on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves should be on every writer's book shelf.

best "grammar" type book out there

I have taught English all my professional life and currently teach writing at Miami Dade College (Wolfson Campus). This is the absolutely best book available to made not only punctuation but sentence creating more educationally available to students. It should be a textbook and not most of those other useless things filled with useless pages of exercises that don't do anything to improve students' (writers') ability to proof read their drafts. Eric Selby

Passionate about Punctuation

"A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing." ~ pg. 9

It is probably not unusual to feel slightly uncomfortable while reading a book on grammar or punctuation. "How many mistakes have I made?" you may ask yourself. As someone who grew up in a country that called parentheses "brakets" I have reason to feel slightly more at home with some of the British usage.

For the most part the book is strangely entertaining. Is it funny? To be honest I laughed three times by page ten and then didn't again until page 63 and 92. So it is humorous in places. I must also say that I'm siding with anyone who hates the Oxford comma.

Lynne Truss spends a lot of time explaining its and it's. One third of the book is dedicated to the apostrophe. Which I must say had many good examples. The rest of the book is dedicated to colons, semicolons, question marks, exclamation marks, commas, hyphens, parentheses and quotation marks.

"The basic rule is straightforward and logical: when the punctuation relates to the quoted words it goes inside the inverted commas; when it relates to the sentence, it goes outside. Unless, of course, you are in America." ~ pg. 155

My only real complaint is that the publisher did not adapt the entire book for an American audience. Comments are made about the difference in usage, but otherwise you are left to fend for yourself.

~ The Rebecca Review