''Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation'' is a non-fiction book written by

Lynne Truss Lynne Truss (born 31 May 1955) is an English author, journalist, novelist, and radio broadcaster and dramatist. She champions correctness and aesthetics in the English language, which is the subject of her 2003 book, '' Eats, Shoots & Leaves: ...

, the former host of

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. The station replaced the BBC Home Service on 30 September 1967 and broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasti ...

's '' Cutting a Dash'' programme. In the book, published in 2003, Truss bemoans the state of

punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...

in the United Kingdom and the United States and describes how rules are being relaxed in today's society. Her goal is to remind readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language by mixing humour and instruction. Truss dedicates the book "to the memory of the striking

Bolshevik The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ...

printers of

St. Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601, ...

who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution". She added this dedication as an afterthought after remembering the

factoid A factoid is either a false statement presented as a fact, ''or'' a true but brief or trivial item of news or information. The term was coined in 1973 by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fa ...

when reading one of her radio plays.

Overview

There is one chapter each on

apostrophe The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one o ...

comma The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical; others give it the appearance of a miniature fille ...

semicolon The semicolon (or semi-colon) is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation. In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought, such as ...

s and colons,

exclamation mark The exclamation mark (also known as exclamation point in American English) is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or to show wikt:emphasis, emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks ...

question mark The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation, punctuation mark that indicates a question or interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. History The history of the question mark is ...

s and

quotation mark Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the sam ...

italic type In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography. Owing to the influence f ...

dash The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...

es,

bracket A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their n ...

s, ellipses and

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for emotion icon, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using Character (symbol), characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and Alphabet, letters—to express a person's feelings, mood ...

s, and

hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with t ...

s. Truss touches on varied aspects of the history of punctuation and includes many anecdotes. Contrary to usual publishing practice, the US edition of the book left the original British conventions intact.

Title

The title of the book is a

syntactic ambiguity Syntactic ambiguity, also known as structural ambiguity, amphiboly, or amphibology, is characterized by the potential for a sentence to yield multiple interpretations due to its ambiguous syntax. This form of ambiguity is not derived from the va ...

a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous or erroneous grammatical constructionand derived from a joke popularised by Ursula Le Guin (a variant on a "

bar joke A bar joke is a type of joke cycle. The basic syntax is as follows: "A walks into a bar and ". First recorded example The earliest known example of a bar joke is Sumerian, appearing in the form of two slightly different versions of a proverb ...

") about bad punctuation: The joke turns on the ambiguity of the final

sentence fragment In grammar, sentence and clause structure, commonly known as sentence composition, is the classification of sentences based on the number and kind of clauses in their syntactic structure. Such division is an element of traditional grammar. Typolog ...

. As intended by the author, "eats" is a verb, while "shoots" and "leaves" are the verb's

objects Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ai ...

: a panda's diet consists of

shoot Shoot most commonly refers to: * Shoot (botany), an immature plant or portion of a plant * Shooting, the firing of projectile weapons * Photo shoot, a photography session; an event wherein a photographer takes photographs Shoot may also refer t ...

s and

leaves A leaf (: leaves) is a principal appendage of the stem of a vascular plant, usually borne laterally above ground and specialized for photosynthesis. Leaves are collectively called foliage, as in "autumn foliage", while the leaves, stem, ...

. However, the erroneous introduction of the comma gives the mistaken impression that the sentence fragment comprises three verbs listing in sequence the panda's characteristic conduct: it eats, then it shoots, and finally it leaves.

Reception

The book was a commercial success. In 2004, the US edition became a ''New York Times'' best-seller. In a 2004 review,

Louis Menand Louis Menand (; born January 21, 1952) is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book '' The Metaphysical Club'' (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America. Life ...

of ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

'' pointed out several dozen punctuation errors in the book, including one in the dedication, and wrote that "an Englishwoman lecturing Americans on

s is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss's departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness." In ''The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left'' (

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

2006), linguist

David Crystal David Crystal, (born 6 July 1941) is a British linguist who works on the linguistics of the English language. Crystal studied English at University College London and has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He was aw ...

analyses the

linguistic purism Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is a concept with two common meanings: one with respect to foreign languages and the other with respect to the internal variants of a language (dialects). The first meaning is the historical trend ...

of Truss and other writers through the ages. In 2006, English lecturer Nicholas Waters released ''Eats, Roots & Leaves'', criticising the "grammar fascists" who "want to stop the language moving into the 21st century". This view was shared by dyslexic English comedian and satirist

Marcus Brigstocke Marcus Alexander Brigstocke (born 8 May 1973) is a British comedian and actor. He has worked in stand-up comedy, television, radio and musical theatre. He has appeared on many BBC television and radio shows. Early life Brigstocke is the son of N ...

in a 2007 episode of ''

Room 101 The Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty are the four ministries of the government of Oceania in the 1949 dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', by George Orwell. The use of contradictor ...

'', in which he blames Truss's book for starting off a trend in which people have become " grammar bullies".

Editions

* * * * * In July 2006, Putnam Juvenile published a 32-page follow-up for children entitled ''Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference!''. Based on the same concept, this version covers only the section on comma usage and uses cartoons to explain the problems presented by their poor usage.

References

External links