Lynne Truss - Eats, Shoots & Leaves - The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

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This upload was inspired by the posts in the Things that Annoy You-Pet Peeves thread under the General Chat topic in the Forums. It's only a little over an hour and well worth the time.



Quote:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.



'Why?' asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit.



The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.



'I’m a panda,' he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'



The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.



Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.







So punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.



In 2002 Lynne Truss presented Cutting a Dash, a well-received BBC Radio 4 series about punctuation, which led to the writing of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The book became a runaway success in the UK, hitting number one on the bestseller lists and prompting extraordinary headlines such as Grammar Book Tops Bestseller List (BBC News). With more than 500,000 copies of her book in print in her native England, Lynne Truss is ready to rally the troops on this side of the pond with her rousing cry, Sticklers unite!



Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots and Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From George Orwell shunning the semicolon, to New Yorker editor Harold Ross's epic arguments with James Thurber over commas, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.







What People Are Saying



Frank McCourt



Sticklers unite!



What people are saying about Eats, Shoots & Leaves



If Lynne Truss were Roman Catholic I’d nominate her for sainthood. As it is, thousands of English teachers from Maine to Maui will be calling down blessings on her merry, learned head. (author of Angela’s Ashes)







Richard Lederer



There is a multitude of us riding this planet for whom apostrophe catastrophes, quotation bloatation, mad dashes, and other comma-tose errors squeak like chalk across the blackboard of our sensibilities. At last we who are punctilious about punctuation have a manifesto, and it is titled Eats, Shoots and Leaves.



—(Richard Lederer, author of A Man of My Words and Anguished English)







James Lipton



At long last, a worthy tribute to punctuation’s stepchildren: the neglected semicolon, the enigmatic ellipsis and the mad dash. Punc-rock on!



—(James Lipton, author of An Exaltation of Larks and writer and host of Inside the Actors Studio)







Entertaining and educational! :evo: