Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Anxious about the apostrophe? Confused by the comma? Stumped by the semicolon? Join Lynne Truss on a hilarious tour through the rules of punctuation that is sure to sort the dashes from the hyphens. We all had the basic rules of punctuation drilled into us at school, but punctuation pedants have good reason to suspect they never sank in. ‘Its Summer!’ screams a sign that sets our teeth on edge. ‘Pansy’s ready’, we learn to our considerable interest (‘Is she?’) as we browse among the bedding plants. It is not only the rules of punctuation that have come under attack but also a sense of why they matter. In this runaway bestseller, Lynne Truss takes the fight to emoticons and greengrocers’ apostrophes with a war cry of ‘Sticklers unite!’
Stats for nerds
11recommend
24mentions
21people
2007–2026years
50% recommend42% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Grammatically an emdash is fine in most places a comma is fine. It adds a bit more emphasis to the bit after the dash.
I went to the grocery store, and bought tomatoes.
I went to the grocery store---and bought a Ferrari.
The second one has a bit more of a dramatic pause.
"Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" is a fun book with a great chapter about the dash with many good examples.
- There is a book "Eats Shoots and Leaves" that gets at the importance of knowing when (and when not) do deploy the punctuation:
https://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuat...?
I also enjoy how meaning of a whole sentence can be inverted by a bit of punctuation:
a. "A woman without her man is nothing."
b. "A woman: without her, man is nothing."
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a good one on punctuation. Dreyer’s English is a good recent one. Woe Is I is a classic. There are a lot of style guides and fun little books about grammar and editing. My partner is a editor at a publishing house so she guides me a lot on things like this. I’m not sure it can be automated, but the best things I can say I’ve learned about writing are: don’t do anything obviously wrong (grammatically, syntactically, factually), be concise/specific, and keep your purpose/relationship to the reader at the front of your mind.
- 1. On Writing Well by William Zinsser
2. Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
3. The Elements of Style by Strunk & White
4. The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
5. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
6. Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark
7. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
8. The Art of Plain Talk by Rudolf Flesch
9. A Writer's Reference by Diana Hacker
10. Writing Science by Joshua Schimel
- Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
It's more humor than education, and more punctuation than grammar, but it's entertaining and sarcastic and very fun to read.
https://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuat...
- Uh, no, poor grammar or words or phrases used improperly can genuinely have cascade / domino effects. Brush up on "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" if you wish to counter-balance your math-centric logic notions with how similar principles apply in written language. English is, without question, one of the more tricky (re: confusing) mutts of linguistics.
