Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.
• Position: Book Review

EATS SHOOTS & LEAVES: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation BY LYNNE TRUSS GOTHAM 2004, 209 PAGES, $17.50

Lynne Truss styles herself a "stickler," and what she stickles about is the punctuational anarchy she encounters everywhere. Confusion of "its" and "it's" seems epidemic, and commas are all too commonly used to splice independent clauses. Truss, a British journalist and editor, offers a droll but tenacious defense of proper markings in proper places. "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place," wrote Ukranian journalist Isaac Babel. Truss despairs that we are living in a period in which ignorance and indifference have depleted our powers of expression. "The reason to stand up for punctuation," she argues, "is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning."

Eats Shoots & Leaves became an unlikely best seller when published in the United Kingdom in 2003. The American edition reproduces the original, including British spellings ("behaviour," "cheque"), allusions (London's 73 bus), and punctuation (periods outside quotation marks), and it retains Truss' truculence about careless usage of semicolons and parentheses. The title of her book comes from a joke about a panda who walks into a cafe, consumes a sandwich, and then fires two shots. An explanation for the bizarre behavior is found in a poorly punctuated wildlife manual. The entry for "Panda" states: "Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Truss offers several other examples in which punctuation determines sense. Consider the difference between "The convict said the...