Eats, Shoots & Leaves For Children: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference

click here for more details, find new or used items	Lynne Truss Used from £25.00 Pages: 32 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1861978162 Pub: Profile Books Pub date: 2006-09-14 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 30324

Reader Reviews:

Where is it? (0/0 people found this helpful)

This book never arrived, despite my having enquired about it. Consequently, I'm in no position to write a review!

Excellent! (0/0 people found this helpful)

Excellent way to teach children (and adults) - people really don't understand the value of the comma.
Good seller.

A really useful aid to punctuation (0/0 people found this helpful)

Humourous and thoughtful book. Very informative, a good help with punctuation and lighted hearted in it's approach. Bought two, one to give to my son.

Instructive and amusing (0/0 people found this helpful)

This is a really good read! Quite remarkable for a book on what could be a very dry subject.
Lynne manages to bring the whole subject to life, with clear instructions on the correct use of punctuation and many amusing examples and fascinating pieces of history.

It's a bright, bright moonlight night tonight (3/7 people found this helpful)

The author is a self-confessed stickler for punctuation, yet what this book makes clear is that punctuation itself is only a few hundred years old, which is modest when you think that writing is much older than that. Furthermore, it is continually evolving, just like language itself. I'm certainly not going to claim that my punctuation is perfect, because I know it isn't. Within Amazon reviews, I deliberately don't use quotation marks around titles (although I use them elsewhere), not least because Amazon's software historically behaved strangely when confronted by quotation marks. Maybe those quirks are consigned to history, but I continue writing reviews without quotation marks for the sake of consistency.

Another problem for the author is my use of CD's to indicate more than one CD, where she says the apostrophe is wrong. I adopted the convention because it is widely accepted and looks better - unlike book's, which I'll never use as a plural; I'll only use in its correct context, for example the book's title. I also tend to use more commas than some people may think is necessary, but I'd rather use too many than too few. Reading this book, it is clear that the rules for commas are imprecise, though there are some situations where the presence or absence of a comma makes a lot of difference.

Over and above my obvious disregard for those (and maybe other) rules, I make errors too, though hopefully not too many. Meanwhile, the author may be a stickler for punctuation but did not research the meaning of a Scottish sentence that she used in her book, simply stating that she had no idea what it meant. (The answer is somewhere on this page.)

After a lengthy introduction (a chapter in itself, running to more than thirty pages), the author devotes several chapters to different punctuation marks, illustrating how much difference the various marks make. It is clear that using no punctuation marks would make text difficult to read, but the author emphasizes that you can completely change, or even reverse, the meaning of text depending on how it is punctuated.

The letter from Jill to Jack is particularly funny. The author presents one version where Jill thinks Jack is perfect and an alternative in which she thinks Jack is useless. No words are different, just the punctuation and associated capital letters. For those of you who like to test yourself, I present you with an un-punctuated version (not easy to force through a word processor, so I wrote it in Notepad and pasted it in), from which you can work out how to achieve these contrasting results. In working out your solutions, you may use periods (we Brits call them full stops), capital letters, commas, question marks, apostrophes, exclamation marks, colons and semicolons (but you won't need all of them). Note that it might be possible to arrive at slightly different solutions to those in the book. Here goes

dear jack i want a man who knows what love is all about you are generous kind thoughtful people who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior you have ruined me for other men i yearn for you i have no feelings whatsoever when were apart i can be forever happy will you let me be yours jill

If you can't work out both answers, you definitely need this book. Yes, punctuation is much more important than most of us realize. This book probably isn't the definitive guide, but the author's witty approach to the subject got more people interested in the subject than any other book has ever done.

Similar Products

Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, Every Punctuation Mark Counts!

Eats, Shites & Leaves: Crap English and How to Use It

The Harcourt Anthology of Drama

Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door)

Beginning theory (third edition): An introduction to literary and cultural theory (Beginnings)

Categories

Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories: