Lynne Truss is a stickler. She gets terribly upset about such things as the London transit ad for the film Two Weeks Notice: "Where was the apostrophe? Surely there should be an apostrophe on that bus?" But rather than simply stewing over humanity's increasing inability to punctuate, or taking paintbrush in hand and undertaking a guerilla campaign to correct offending signage, Truss chose to write the runaway British bestseller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. And for anyone who writes, whether it be book reviews, advertising copy or simply e-mails, this book is an essential guide to proper punctuation.

How, you may be asking yourself, does a book with the subtitle The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation ever become a bestseller? The secret is Lynne Truss's wonderful sense of humor. She's passionate about punctuation, but she writes with a self-deprecating style that makes her mania positively endearing. And she's not alone in her obsession! She cites far more fanatical sticklers including George Bernard Shaw, Martin Amis and James Thurber. In fact, Thurber's disagreements with New Yorker editor Harold Ross sometimes lead to "very strong words about commas. It is pleasant to picture the scene: two hard-drinking alpha males in serious trilbies smacking a big desk and barking at each other over the niceties of punctuation."

Eats, Shoots & Leaves leads the reader through the minefields of correct comma usage (there are at least 17 rules for the comma) and proper apostrophe placement. Here's just one of the amusing examples Truss employs -- rule 7 for apostrophes: "It indicates the plurals of letters: In the winter months, his R's blew off (old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore joke, explaining the mysterious zoo sign 'T OPICAL FISH, THIS WAY')."

According to Truss, teachers stopped emphasizing the importance of punctuation during the latter half of the 20th century because it, along with grammar and spelling, "got in the way of self-expression." Yet this same period also saw "the explosion in universal written communication caused by the personal computer." She bemoans the type-now, think-later approach to writing that e-mail fosters, coming down particularly hard on the emoticon. "Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader's attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your e-mail and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind."

It's obviously not an easy time to be a stickler. Our world is full of inanities such as the roadside sign, "Children Drive Slowly." (Don't they, though?) Thankfully, Lynne Truss has arrived on the scene with Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and we can all have a chuckle while gaining new insights into the functions of the colon, dash and parenthesis. :-)

- Rambles
written by Gregg Thurlbeck
published 18 December 2004