October 20, 2004
Eats Shoots and Leaves
Meet Lynne Truss: my hero of the year.
Author of her book on a zero-tolerance approach to punctuation, Truss has made me laugh, has explained the rules of using punctuation marks, and has made me absolutely nervous almost every time I type a sentence. Mission accomplished!
ES&L is a book written for people like me: the people who freak out when they see "DVD'S" on a sign outside the local video store. We're the kind of people who read books with a pen in hand so we can correct any mistakes we find. In college I always made corrections in my textbooks (can you believe they actually spelled the poem as "Westminister Abbey"?) , and out of college I make corrections to other books. Just recently I was reading the first of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series, and was shocked to see how poorly edited it was, so much so that I stopped reading the book out of protest.
And along comes this wonderful book for anal people like me. I know I'm not perfect, but according to the online survey, I am a grammar god. So it's no surprise that I loved this book. Any woman who would protest at the opening of "Two Weeks Notice" by holding an apostrophe on a stick in the proper location in front of the movie theatre is a hero of mine.
Truss goes through each punctuation mark, beginning with the apostrophe and ending with the hyphen. Her book isn't just a book of rules; it contains history, stories, examples, and plenty of laughs. Now that I've finished, I think I'll probably read it once every couple of years as a refresher, and as a form of entertainment.
It's a bestseller and well worth the purchase, especially if you're a stickler for getting it right. I know David has read it as well. Any additional comments? It's one of my favorite reads of the year.
Posted by wendytime at October 20, 2004 01:22 PM | TrackBackI'd probably actually like reading it. I'm comma-happy though, so I'm sure I used them wrong all the time. And I suck at spelling, so it might not do me any good anyway.
Posted by: Wendy on October 20, 2004 02:14 PMI had a colleague who went through Eats, Shoots & Leaves with a red pen and marked all the grammatically incorrect sentences in the book. There are more than you'd think, and it's not always a British vs. American thing.
But yeah, it is a fun read. And it's always great when sarcasm shows up in unexpected places, like a grammar book.
Posted by: Julie on October 20, 2004 02:18 PMI haven't read ES&L, but I don't mind when informal writing doesn't always have complete sentences. Like this one. (I'd never let my students do that, though.)
But I'm like you, Jeri. It's been driving me nuts that what I'm reading right now, a scholarly description of a MS of Piers Plowman, uses n-dashes instead of hyphens when it refers to "A-text" or "B-text" (as well as using them properly, between numbers). But it's so weird because it's much more common to see hyphens instead of n-dashes, but this one errs the other way, overusing the n-dashes.
Posted by: Jonathan on October 20, 2004 04:37 PMDisgruntled English teachers unite!
I'd like to read that book, as well. Incorrect punctuation drives me crazy. One of my biggest pet peeves is "inappropriate quotation marks" (such as I have just demonstrated). I see them used by businesses all the time, as in "Kids eat free" (quotations included). Is the sign quoting somebody? If so, who is the source, and why is he/she not cited? If not, why use quotation marks?
Posted by: Kyle on October 21, 2004 11:35 AMWhenever I see Q-marks used instead of underlining or whatever, like on a menu, I always wonder if it's a joke: "Made with real beef" just looks suspicious.
Posted by: Jonathan on October 22, 2004 03:55 AM