As Lynne Truss’s popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves prepares to enjoy a second wave of readership this April thanks to its release in trade paperback, reviewers everywhere are preparing for some extra spellchecking and thesaurus consultations. It’s not that it’s difficult to come up with things to say about this funny, insightful approach to punctuation, but it’s how to say it that is causing the problem. I may have already done the book an injustice in my first sentence; I mean is it “Lynne Truss’s book” or “Lynne Truss’ book”? Luckily for me, and all readers of the bestseller, Truss answers all of those tricky punctuation questions in an understandable, enjoyable way.
When Truss first set out to write Eats, Shoots & Leaves, she thought it may appeal to the tiny minority of British people “who love punctuation and don’t like to see it mucked with”. But like good manners, readers around the world have embraced punctuation (as a necessary part of our day-to-day lives; it is a guide to readers that doesn’t draw attention to itself.
If you start noticing it, something’s not right. For example, can you spot the problem in the following sentence: “Judge a tree from it’s fruit, not the leaves”? The stonemason that carved that particular sentence into a stone in a Florida shopping mall sure didn’t.
And what about those over-zealous writers, who just, can’t, seem, to stop, using commas?
Punctuation marks, are the traffic signals of language: “they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop”. Without punctuation, things tend to go awry. Just look at the difference in meaning between these two sentences thanks to simple punctuation:
A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
Using humour and examples from popular culture, Truss details the 17 proper uses of the comma (yes 17), the apostrophe, the colon, the semi-colon, the hyphen, the period, and other marks that we use and abuse. She does point out, however, that “the rules” for punctuation are constantly changing because they aren’t rules as much as conventions. So just when you think you’ve got it, we go and take the comma out before the last item in a list.
There’s a good reason why Eats, Shoots & Leaves has become a bestseller; Truss has written a truly enjoyable book. The fact that you’re learning while reading is an added bonus.
For the record, brackets and parentheses are the same things, period is the equivalent of full stop, whether you say exclamation point or exclamation mark, you’re equally excited and it’s “Lynne Truss’s book” that will show you the way.
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