Your Humble Blogger doesn’t have a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation to hand, so this note will be fairly general. Not, however, as general as Go Ye Forth and Read, which was my initial reaction.
Lynne Truss does three things in the book. Best (and, as it happens, mostly at the beginning of the book), she describes what it is like to be a stickler. This stuff is beyond brilliant; she nails not only the initial shock at seeing bad punctuation (letting bus after bus go by whilst frozenly staring at the sign for Two Weeks Notice) but the self-doubt and reticence that goes with being the craziest person in the Shoppe. If you are a Stickler or know one, this stuff makes the book a must.
The second aspect is the discussion of the history of punctuation. This is interesting enough, and she does a fine job with it. The semicolon, the rhetorical question mark, and the Oxford comma (or should that be the semicolon, the rhetorical question mark and the Oxford comma) are highlighted, and Ms. Truss acknowledges—celebrates!—the evolution of language, grammar and punctuation (or perhaps language, grammar, and punctuation). It’s wittily done, but it’s not go-forth-and-read stuff. [Note: Word suggests the second “it’s” in that sentence should be “its”: curse you, Bill Gates!]
The third thing she does is explain the most basic rules of punctuation. She does this, well, well. Not particularly entertainingly (although the Bad Examples are, of course, as entertaining as those sorts of things often are), and certainly not thoroughly, but well. The only bits in there that were new to me were the Britishisms, or rather the Americanisms I didn’t know were such. I probably sound unduly cranky here; I can’t imagine much of anyone writing this bit better than Ms. Truss did, after all. It’s just ... a punctuation text. No chortles, hardly any snickers, just the nod and the muttered “Yep, that’s the rule all right”. [Note: YHB knows he should put a comma before the quote and the period inside the marks, he just dislikes the rule, and, in his Shavian way, rebels against it by doing it the nonstandard way. Hah! Take that, sticklers! That’ll keep ya’ up at night!]
In short, Your Humble Blogger liked the book a lot, but it went downhill after the introduction and the first chapter, which had more about Sticklers and less about the actual rules. Also, while I’m grousing, Ms. Truss doesn’t get the Internet (putting her in the same category as Everybody in the World); her comments on IM and web pages make her appear silly and ignorant rather than cranky and retrograde. But, as I remarked after a particularly loud snort caused an inquiring look, if there weren’t anything in the book to disagree with, it would have been a failure, right?
Oh, and one more thing: the American edition is identical with the English. No messing about with exclamation marks and points, or with periods and full stops. No translation of jokes. Rest assured, gentle reader, you are getting the echt book. Plus, there's a very funny “Introduction to the North American Edition”.
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-Vardibidian.