52 Books in 52 Weeks: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

"There's something I learned long ago, down where the rail waters flow." – Zap Mama, Bandy Bandy (featuring Erykah Badu)

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, 2003 (Gotham Books). I'm a snob. In the comfortable safety of my desk chair, I'm audibly mocking you if you dare use "your" for "you're" (my biggest punctuation pet peeve) or if your emails are peppered with unnecessary exclamation points and an overabundance of emoticons. I like the smiley in IM conversations; I hate it in email. It's just a thing. When I meet a pretty young thing that I might want to break bread with on occasion, I'm filled with anxiety over that first email: will she write in complete sentences with capital letters and periods and paragraphs, or will I be left reading a ton of LOLs and dashes and ellipses? The bad email is going to seriously hamper this relationship.

It's with that kind of word nerd superiority complex that I went into Lynne Truss' short book on punctuation. I'm not a stickler, mind, but I do know when things aren't written properly and there are certain crimes against grammar that I just can't abide. Even though I'm sometimes a lazy writer here, I know the problems. I've been known to throw an extra comma where it doesn't belong, and when I'm furiously typing, the "there", "their" and "they're" usage can get hairy. In the last week alone, I've edited recent posts over and over again -- correcting tense and errant apostrophes. Eats, Shoots & Leaves has only succeeded in ramping up my snobbery and intensity.

I politely chided a friend in the comments of a post because she had made a grammar error and she didn't even catch it. That riled me up even more. It's driving me crazy that some old entries in here imported funny and now there are question marks masquerading as apostrophes and single quotes (not to mention the number of dead links, but that's more web nerd than parts of speech geekery isn't it?). Even now, I'm obsessing over whether I'm using punctuation correctly in this piece. I've got two hyphens impersonating a dash and I've got colons and semi-colons up there that I'm pretty sure I'm using the right way but can anyone ever be completely sure? Sigh.

But, yes, I'm a snob. My blogroll is filled with bloggers who are actually writers or aspire to be. If you're going to use words, I want you to have a way with them. I love that most of you understand the importance of setting off proper titles of books and films (whether it be in quotes, italics, or the web person's favorite: the bold) and that you probably are wondering whether or not the period or question mark goes inside or outside the direct quote marks. Ms. Truss makes me feel a little stuffy about caring about such things but there is definitely a comfort in knowing I'm not alone. I appreciated most the history of punctuation she peppered throughout the book along with her very dry British humor and the delight with which she plays with her own writing, saving the colon and semi-colon until she is actually talking about them; keeping the hyphen and dash under-wraps and then exploding with them at the perfect time.

If you're a word nerd, you must read Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Comments

[Afsheen]

Is it Truss' or Truss's? Strunk and White (which, yes, I just found from the bottom shelf of the bookcase at 1:20 AM using a flashlight to avoid turning on all the lights) say to add apostrophe s to every name, regardless of final consonant, to indicate possessive, but I thought there was an exception if the name ends in double s.

Perhaps I am wrong. Either way, there's no chance of me getting up again to find another reference book.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves sounds good; it's on the shelf already, so I hope to read it one of these days.

[Jason]

If I was being completely accurate it would be Truss's but stylistically I don't like the apostrophe-s at the end of words that end with 's' and definitely not after a double 's'.

It's an odd choice for me, too, because I know that if it was said aloud, I would say it as "Trusses" but visually, in the written word, that just bugs me.

[monique]

You nailed this review; I enjoyed reading it.

[khalil]

Hey Jason,

As someone who does a lot of writing, I can say that I am horrible at remembering grammatical conventions. I'm particularly bad at noticing my own errors. Thank god for folks who review my work before I give it to merciless profs.

I think I'm going to give this book a read. And I might just byte your style and start posting about my reads.

My annoyance at the moment is that I've not learned my blogging program well. I hate how it makes little changes...like to my font style or size when I try to be slick and add block quotes or lines to seperate text in my entries. Live and learn.

Happy Sunday,

khalil

[girlwonder]

This is on my list of books to get. I'm really not a snob in regards to small things and I definitely don't have anything against all lowercases, since generally I prefer to type all lowercase - mostly because I'm too lazy to hit the shift key.

[Five17]

For the em-dash and such I'm always referencing this site http://www.natural-innovations.com/wa/doc-charset.html
It doesn't always work, but I can be more annoying than ∑M¤†i¢ºn§. I'm kidding, of course. That sort of nonsense would drive me crazy.