Eats, Shoots
A review by Paul Clark Landmann
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda make towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
That old British gag introduces us to Lynne Truss’s spirited, witty, and helpful guide, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
Do we really need a book about punctuation? Even the smallest libraries have shelves crammed with grammar books, and some of them are good. My favorite, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, organized, simplified, and explained all the punctuation rules that I need. But I welcome Ms. Truss’s book because it is fun, because it is helpful, and because it introduces the art and science of punctuation to people who would not usually pick up a book on that subject. The fact that it is a runaway best seller in Britain and the United States proves that Lynne Truss has reached beyond grumpy editors and graying schoolmarms.
That is important because punctuation is important. It gives our writing clarity. It helps convey our thoughts efficiently and accurately.
Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. I have even seen a rather fanciful reference to the full stop and comma as ‘invisible servants in fairy tales – the ones who bring glasses who bring glasses of water and pillows, not storms of weather or love.’ But best of all, I think, is the simple advice given by the style book of a national newspaper: that punctuation is “a courtesy designed
Those are all good reasons to be careful about punctuation. As a writer specializing in materials designed to persuade readers, I favor the “traffic signals” explanation. Properly employed, punctuation keeps the writer in charge of his or her message. Punctuation should keep the reader on track.
Quickly read, it is the kind of book one might stuff into a briefcase for a cross-country flight. I know there are readers of this column will feel that I have pushed beyond the limits of credulity. But anyone who reads more than the first hundred words of this book will realize that they have their hands on a real gem—a book that is both helpful and fun to read. Just look at how she spells out the differences between semicolons and colons:
Expectation is what these stops are about; expectation and elastic energy. Like internal springs, they propel you forward in a sentence towards more information, and the essential difference between them is that while the semicolon lightly propels you in any direction related to the foregoing (“Whee! Surprise me!”), the colon nudges you along lines already subtly laid down.
Later, in the same paragraph, she quips, “… that semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends. Their agents gently remind them, “George Orwell managed without, you know.”
Eats, Shoots & Leaves has arrived just in time. Punctuation standards have declined, egregiously! Sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in email, and in business memos have made proper punctuation an endangered species. And the problems go well beyond casual communication when we allow sloppy punctuation to emasculate our messages and muss the image we try to project.
There are some minor problems with the book, however. First, Eats was written for a British audience which means there are some punctuation differences. Brits, logically, place periods and commas outside of quotation marks if the context demands it. Americans favor an aesthetic approach that defies context. Damned the context, Americans would “put periods or commas inside the quotes,” because “xyz.” looks better than “xyz”. That white gap under the quotation mark offended American typographers. Of course, it is less of a problem now that kerning is commonplace.
Truss is also ambiguous about some rules. She is very liberal about dashes. Americans are really more conservative about usage, queen or no queen. Dashes are over-used on both sides of “the Pond.” British form calls for spaces to surround the dash; American, calls for none. I use a comma in series before and, except when writing for newspapers or magazines. She calls that an “Oxford comma.” I had never heard that term before, and I am not sure that I like it. I use that comma because it keeps the series rhythm going, not for academic purity. She waffles here.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves contains an inspired bibliography but it does not have footnotes or an index. Those omissions diminish its use as a reference tool. That is a real pity because there are so many delicious quotes.
The recipient of Britain's biggest non-fiction award, “the Samuel Johnson,” Lynne Truss’s writing career has included stints as a literary journalist, book reviewer, critic, columnist, and sportswriter. She has published six books including three novels. She has also written many scripts for BBC Radio, including dramas, sitcoms, and talks.
“Sticklers unite” she shouts. “You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion–and arguably you didn't have much of that to begin with.” Reinforce your sense of proportion: run—don’t walk—to the nearest bookstore. Everyone who writes needs this book.
Copyright © 2005 Web Landmann
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