Review: Eats, Shoots, and Leaves
My Rating: 4/5
About the Book
Eats, Shoots, & Leaves is a humorous (and sarcastic) book that explores how punctuation affects our day-to-day lives. Written almost as an inside joke to those self-appointed “grammar sticklers,” author Lynne Truss points to all her pet peeves about how people misuse punctuation, and how those misuses create ridiculous outcomes. While there are many rules about how to use specific punctuation marks (like semicolons and dashes), the book is not intended to be a strict resource book (that’s for the grammarians, Truss insists). Rather, the book elicits a conversation about how we might function (or not function) without punctuation and how we can use punctuation to our advantage to enhance not only clarity but style.
Author: Lynne Truss
Publisher: Gotham Books
Cost: about $10 on Amazon
ISBN: 978-1592402038
What I Liked
Truss’s book is an enjoyable, quick read that provides useful insight into how the quirky English language works. Truss uses a number of fantastic examples that sheds light on all kinds of issues related to punctuation, including the Oxford comma, colons, and hyphens. One funny example is how the phrase “extra marital sex,” when not hyphenated, communicates a very different meaning than what we would expect it to. Truss addresses the confusion of commas in legal jargon: “Legal English, with its highfalutin’ efforts to cover everything, nearly always ends up leaving itself semantically wide open”; the problem with exclamation marks: “there is only one thing more mortifying that having an exclamation mark removed by an editor–an exclamation mark added in”; and the effect of intentional comma splices: “done knowingly by an established writer, the comma splice is effective, poetic, dashing.”
What I Didn’t Like
Truss’s humor occasionally crosses the line into classist mockery. One of my students said she felt a bit bullied and insulted by Truss’s brazen and presumptuous comments such as “done ignorantly by ignorant people, it is awful” (speaking of the comma splice) and “don’t use commas like a stupid person.” Truss assumes her reader already is a brilliant grammarian and the book is written, in many ways, to insult those who don’t use grammar well. In this sense, the book often is more lightehearted than helpful, but that isn’t always a terrible thing. Also problematic for some American readers, the book is written in British English, which uses a number of punctuation rules differently than we do in America.
How I Used It
I used this book in a Master’s-level course on editing and grammar as an introductory reading to the course. My students read the entire book over a week and we were able to spark a lively discussion about how language and punctuation functions. Some of the value that comes from discussing a book like this is that students are able to quickly grasp onto some the more complicated ideas to teach when it comes to writing and communication: like how we can use punctuation to affect rhetorical moves and persuasion, how the semicolon is an optional punctuation mark that has an impressive ability to improve style.