Because You Want to Book Club #3: "Eats Shoots & Leaves"

I have faith in my abilities as a writer, but I am admittedly a horrible typist. I can write with an eye for punctuation and grammar, but when I type what I have written, my fingers fly so quickly across the keys that I don’t think twice about what I do. I can make a mess like nobody’s business when it comes to typing. I hate proofreading my own work, but when it comes to reading the work of others I am unabashedly a stickler for punctuation; having said that, I have no intentions of proofreading this once it is typed and posted. I am a stickler for everyone but myself.

Thankfully there are people like Lynne Truss to make me want to make a better effort. I read her book on punctuation “Eats Shoots and Leaves” pretty much only because I found it randomly on a library shelf. I had heard about it and figured it might be the nice refresher course I needed. I was not let down and was treated to more than just the nitpicking ways you can correct punctuation like many of its detractors state. While the book is about not being afraid to correct the punctuation of others, it also allows a lot of valuable insight as to why certain punctuation is used and what necessitated the need for it. Some of the history lessons are simply fascinating.

The book’s one major downfall is that even at a little over 200 pages it is too long by at least a third. A lot of the ground covered becomes repetitive and some of the reading is so dry you have to fight not to skim over it particularly the ridiculously long diatribe about use of the apostrophe (something Truss has written an entire book about as well). Also, and this is being a bit nitpicky, this book is very British. Expect to be inundated with reasons why American punctuation is wrong by European standards, but in the end actually maintains the formalities of the English language that British compositions have stopped using (commas within quotations instead of after, commas after the opening greeting of a letter, and particularly the Oxford comma).

Truss pulls her arguments together quite nicely in the book’s final chapter when she talks of how punctuation is becoming a dying component of language in the era of email, text messages, and on-line chatting. She pulls no punches when discussing how it annoys her, but is more than willing to admit her own short comings. Truss can be a hard ass, but she at least knows when to shut it off to an extent so she is never too hard on herself. She is like the teacher who on the surface seems mean, but has a wicked sense of humour and deep down really wants to help.

Grade: B-