Having just finishing reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, seeing as I enjoyed it tremendously, I thought I would write a review.

Now, you wouldn’t think that a book about punctuation would be a source of laughter, would you? You’d be surprised by Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Lynne Truss’ writing style is to be commended, simply because she makes what many people would think a stuffy, academic, and above all, boring, subject, actually quite amusing.

Truss appeals to that ‘stickler’ in me who finds mis-punctuation by the masses pretty damn annoying, such as: placing the apostrophe in the wrong place; not using commas or using too many commas; not knowing when or how to use colons and semi-colons; when to use single and double quotation marks etc. There’s even a ‘Punctuation Repair Kit” in the book, with adhesive stickers of apostrophes, full stops, question marks, exclamation marks etc. so any old stickler can stick ‘em where he or she spots a punctuation no-no and corrects it. The idea just tinkles me pink!

I’d like to quote Truss at page 136,

“Victor Hugo[,] (…) when he wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling – reportedly telegraphed his publisher with the simple inquiry “?” and received the expressive reply “!”

To me, that quote sums up the nature of Truss’ book. It demonstrates just how important punctuation is to the English language, and how it should be preserved against an influx of new technologies which are influencing the way we write English, which is causing us to neglect niceties such as spelling and punctuation. It also shows just how expressive punctuation – that is, without any words at all – can be.