On Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Life is tons of discipline. You first discipline your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation.
Robert Frost

Sticklers Unite!
Lynne Truss


Can a book that explains the rules of punctuation be entertaining?

Absolutely.

A friend of ours—who is a fellow lover of language—gave the book to my wife and me as a Christmas present. At the time I thought it an odd gift. But now, after having read Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, I’m happy to report that our friend’s assurances that we would love the book were on target.

For the past three years, Eats, Shoots and Leaves—a treatise on the frequent misuses and abuses of punctuation—has been a best-seller throughout the English-speaking world.

“A book about punctuation, a best-seller?” you say.

You bet.

Lynne Truss’s (do I still need to add another s after the apostrophe when a surname ends in double s?) book has been amply reviewed; so I won’t burden you with my critical commentaries on her work.

Instead, I’d like to note that all of my life I’ve been terrified of punctuation. Even today, as a published writer, I still agonize over the placement of commas, colons, apostrophes, and other assorted guideposts that, as Truss reminds us, are there to simplify a reader’s journey through a text.

And I’m not kidding about the fear. I sometimes stare for what seems like eons at a hardcopy, paralyzed over whether I should use a semi-colon or a period. In fact, the only punctuation mark I rejoice in using is the dash—I feel such an affinity for this mark that my editors have frowned over my exploitation of this friendly device. (Truss writes that when dashes are used in abundance—as certainly happens in my case—they suggest “baroque and hyperactive silliness.” I like that. The next time someone asks me to describe myself, I’ll say—“I’m silly in a hyperactively baroque way.”)

But most of all, I’m thankful to Truss’s book—the origins of which can be traced to her frustration over the use and abuse of apostrophes in commercial signs—because it has assured me that my fears regarding punctuation are natural; that I’ve been justified in agonizing over the rules governing the placement of these signposts because, although wondrous, they are highly complex; and that the best writers in literary history have also experienced excruciating pains in determining their assignment.

Yes, as a reader I thoroughly enjoyed Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Lynne Truss, in addition to being erudite, is wonderfully witty. Her expositions on the history of punctuation, the dismal state of its present use, and its uncertain future vis-à-vis the internet, make fascinating and fun reading. Indeed, as soon I finished the book, I immediately started to read it again—and with relish.

Although Lynne Truss didn’t convert me into a stickler—as she proclaims to be—thanks to this Christmas gift I shall be forever mindful of not offending this illustrious group of people, for I know that nothing casts more fear into a writer’s heart than a punctuation freak with a marker.