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Thursday, 24 March 2005
Eats, Shoots and Leaves ::
Twice in the last couple of weeks, the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss has come up in conversation. The second time, I went and hunted down this New Yorker review which completely prejudiced me against the book and made me laugh a lot.
The review starts off with: “The first punctuation mistake ... appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma.”
Ah, there’s the sentence that made me laugh most: “An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.”
If you get past the way the reviewer rips apart the book’s own punctuation errors, there’s a part about the writer’s “voice” that I found worth contemplating:
“When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music.”
The thing is, I could probably get behind the author’s sentiments about gross abuses of the English language; I see it everywhere from signs in shopping malls to our president’s, um, interesting way with words. Not having actually read Truss’ book, I hesitate to speculate too much, but it sounds like there’s a discrepancy between the language in which the book is written, and the “zero-tolerance” (hyphen added) approach it would appear to advocate.
My favorite quote on punctuation: “An apostrophe does not mean ‘look out, here comes an S!'"—Dave Barry
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