Staff Book and Media Recommendations

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

Lynne Truss

Grammar, spelling, usage, and punctuation errors can be funny. I saw a sign in a department store that said "Childrenswear." Yes, they do, but isn't that only an indication of the coarsening of our society? However, most errors of English are only painful and plentiful.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation comforts me that I'm not the only stickler for whom the sight of plurals as plural's and quotation marks for "emphasis" causes pain; there are others who rally 'round standard English. This is not to be confused with the English standard, the flag of England that was used before James VI also became James I. Oh, dear. It's so difficult to be perfectly clear when one is a stickler.

The author, Lynne Truss, can pinpoint the moment when she went quietly berserk and swore to set us all straight, once and for all. A grocer's signs pushed her over the edge in autumn of 2002 and unleashed her Inner Stickler (in this case, capitalization is used as a device of irony, elevating a term to the status of a proper noun). She vowed to write a book about this, and this; and this - and this!

The author combines instruction with humor for a quick read and a sense that a well-constructed sentence could quite conceivably right every wrong and elucidate the masses. In a society that seems to revel in ignorance and equate precise language with elitism, her fearless advocacy of standards is refreshing.

I have only one stickleresque suggestion: the subtitle "Zero Tolerance Approach" should be "Zero-Tolerance Approach." ~ Abbey Warner

Reviewed November 2009