Three cheers for Lynne Truss, the extremely droll sports-writer and comic novelist, whose book Eats, Shoots & Leaves makes the history of punctuation a subject at once urgent, sexy and hilarious.Her book is a joyous call to arms for grammatical sticklers everywhere, and I have signed up with delight - John Walsh * Independent *Įats, Shoots & Leaves has been a surprise UK bestseller. Happily, Truss is a funny writer and she has an eye for the grotesque. There should be a government task force with the single duty of rooting out such barbarians and burning them at the stake. Lightning strikes are altogether too random. I think she probably understates her case when she argues that people who persist in writing 'Good food at it's best' deserve to be 'struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave'. She wants them protected rather than revered, respected rather than worshipped, for the vital job they do. she feels a genuine affection for those little full stops and commas, colons and semi-colons. Lynne Truss deserves to be piled high with honours. Climb ladders at dead of night with a pot of paint to remove the redundant apostrophe in 'Video's sold here'. Why? Because people who can't punctuate don't read those books! Of course they don't! They laugh at books like those! Eats, Shoots and Leaves adopts a more militant approach and attempts to recruit an army of punctuation vigilantes: send letters back with the punctuation corrected. These books do their job but somehow punctuation abuse does not diminish. Competition rules remind us: 'The judges decision is final.' Now, many punctuation guides already exist explaining the principles of the apostrophe the comma the semi-colon. Eats, shoots and leaves.' We see signs in shops every day for 'Banana's' and even 'Gateaux's'. 'Large black and white mammal native to China. 'Panda,' ran the entry for his assailant. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation.

The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out.

He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. Not a primer but a 'zero tolerance' manual for direct action. A witty, entertaining, impassioned guide to perfect punctuation, for everyone who cares about precise writing.

Eats shoots & leaves by lynne truss