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June 29, 2004
Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynne Truss
Note to self: use more semi-colons.
Lynn Truss has written a delightful best-seller on the art of using commas, apostrophes, and semi-colons in her Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. After reading this book all I can think of is that I need to use semi-colons more often. Eats, Shoots & Leaves is both a useful guide to punctuation (primarily from a British perspective) and a witty and humorous rant against the declining use of proper punctuation in our culture. Ms. Truss frequently delves into the historical roots of many of the punctuation and type formatting standards we take for granted today.
How could a book on punctuation make it to the best seller list and stay there for... how many months has it been? One reason is by being well written and entertaining. Another reason is that those of us who read books also often like to write. Since the dawn of email and the Internet we've been writing much more than we would ever have expected to. As such, many of us are on the one hand appalled by the lack of proper punctuation populating the emails of those born around the same time as the personal computer, and on the other hand trying to remember what exactly those rules were that we learned so long ago. Eats, Shoots & Leaves appeals to us for both reasons; Truss lambasts the awful punctuation she sees daily while gently explaining the guidelines for doing it right. (I did it! I used a semi-colon in a sentence!)
Here are some useful punctuation tips from Eats, Shoots & Leaves:
1) It's can only be used as a substitute for It is or It has, not for the possessive as in Its time had come.
2) There is debate over the "Oxford" comma - whether you write Red, white, and blue or Red, white and blue. Although people will take bitter stands on either side of the debate, both approaches are used.
3) A hyphen is not a dash although many people have resorted to using hyphens because they can't figure out how to make a dash with their computer keyboard. (On the Mac it is shift, option, hyphen all at once.)
4) When you write a possessive for a person's name that ends with an "s" you should use 's not just a simple apostrophe. Keats's instead of Keats'. However, this rule is not hard and fast. There are plenty of instances where by tradition it's one way or the other.
5) Americans always place a period before the end of a quotation mark. The Brits don't always do this. I prefer the British way; it makes more sense.
(Hurray for the return of the semi-colon!)
Links:
Punctuation game - at Eats, Shoots, and Leaves official website
The Missouri Review, book review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves
The Apostrophe Protection Society
Posted by elise at 11:08 PM
to Non-fiction
Comments
Help! I read your book from cover to cover and enjoyed MOST of it. Please help me. I have written to magazines and newspapers, but none of them have had the courtesy to respond. Why do they and you use a comma before the word "because" in the middle of a sentence? It is a subordinating conjunction, and the subordinate clause is dependent upon the first clause to make sense. It hurts me to see the comma there; I know you can sense my pain. I teach sixth grade English and am a grammar buff. Please help before I retire!
Elaine Hollowell
Posted by: elaine hollowell at September 5, 2004 1:49 PM
Hey, cool site! Feel free to come visit me at www.bookzoony.com!
Posted by: Bookzoony at September 11, 2004 4:40 AM
On page 95; she left out the word she. That's the kind of thing I pay attention to!
Posted by: Dylan at March 1, 2005 3:47 AM
