Eats, Shoots & Leaves

A witty, entertaining, impassioned guide to perfect punctuation, for everyone who cares about precise writing. Not a primer but a 'zero tolerance' manual for direct action.

A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. 'Why?' groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. 'Panda,' ran the entry for his assailant. 'Large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'

We see signs in shops every day for Banana's and even Gateaux's. Competition rules remind us: The judges decision is final. Now, many punctuation guides already exist explaining the principles of the apostrophe the comma the semi-colon. These books do their job but somehow punctuation abuse does not diminish. Why? Because people who can't punctuate don't read those books! Of course they don't! They laugh at books like those!

Eats, Shoots and Leaves adopts a more militant approach and attempts to recruit an army of punctuation vigilantes: send letters back with the punctuation corrected. Do not accept sloppy emails. Climb ladders at dead of night with a pot of paint to remove the redundant apostrophe in Video's sold here.

'Three cheers for Lynne Truss, the extremely droll sports-writer and comic novelist, whose book Eats, Shoots andamp Leaves makes the history of punctuation a subject at once urgent, sexy and hilariousHer book is a joyous call to arms for grammatical sticklers everywhere, and I have signed up with delight'
John Walsh, Independent

'Lynne Truss deserves to be piled high with honours... she feels a genuine affection for those little full stops and commas, colons and semi-colons. She wants them protected rather than revered, respected rather than worshipped, for the vital job they do. I think she probably understates her case when she argues that people who persist in writing Good food at it's best deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. Lightning strikes are altogether too random. There should be a government task force with the single duty of rooting out such barbarians and burning them at the stake. Happily, Truss is a funny writer and she has an eye for the grotesque.