Justin Baker
- A panda walks into a cafe. 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.”
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss, is not the dry punctuation texts of high school or the even dryer ones of college. It makes punctuation rules accessible, and sometimes even captivating, by infusing the discussion of punctuation rules with wit, anecdotes, and historical context. Eats, Shoots & Leaves engages the reader. It allows one to understand the meaning of punctuation and its very importance to civilization itself (and that’s probably not an overstatement, considering the facts in the book and the author’s zealous perspective).
Although my profession is technical writing and technical editing, I have never considered myself a “stickler” for punctuation. That’s not to say that I disregard punctuation in my work. On the contrary, correcting even the most minor of punctuation mistakes is a part of my job that I take seriously. I don’t disregard punctuation even in my personal life. I just don’t go ballistic when I see an apostrophe missing on a menu. What I’m saying is that I have never regarded myself as a stickler in the obsessive vein of Ms. Truss. Early in her book, citing a punctuation error involving the misuse of apostrophes on a printed banner, she firmly states:
- If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don’t bother to go any further.
Ms. Truss may be doing her book a bit of a disservice with this passage because Eats, Shoots & Leaves subsequently brings the subject of punctuation alive to professional writers and editors, students, and average citizens who don’t realize that punctuation could very well change their lives and quite possibly plunge them into decades of suffering at the hands of a brutal communist state. Ms. Truss amusingly dedicates the book “to the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution.” (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Ms. Truss’ punctuation-revolution cry is “Sticklers Unite!”)
It could be that Ms. Truss is only using her wit to facetiously warn us away. I suspect she really wants this book to be read by the masses so that she doesn’t have to suffer at the sight of such signs as “Children Drive Slowly,” which she muses must be “inadvertently descriptive of the disappointing road speeds attainable by infants at the wheel.”
Underneath that self-deprecating wit and facetious calls for sticklers to unite, I think Ms. Truss truly intends for this book to capture the attention of the average person and prompt that person to think of the importance of good punctuation. Why else write a book on punctuation? Sticklers, in theory, are already well-versed in punctuation rules and nuances and, therefore, don’t need this book. Ms. Truss is so exasperated at her daily encounters with punctuation errors such as “readers outlet” and “childrens home” that she has become obsessed with halting the erosion of proper punctuation in the civilized world.
Ms. Truss places this erosion in interesting historical context, and in the process punctuates (no pun intended, of course) the absolute necessity of proper punctuation in holding a civilization together. However, she does cite the fact that most language experts have advised against “embalming language.” Language, including its punctuation, will naturally change over a long period of time, whether we like it or not. However, Ms. Truss states that “the reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.” To allow punctuation to change too rapidly or to just completely erode over a short period of time is to compromise and destroy our ability to communicate with each other. Language is one of the pillars of society. Without a consistent language, society suffers.
Using these two opposite perspectives of language evolution, Ms. Truss addresses the specific longstanding fight among professional writers, editors, and linguists that constantly argue for and against the strict interpretation of grammatical rules. Ms. Truss expounds on this particular context by noting the interesting difference between descriptive linguists and prescriptive grammarians:
- The descriptive sort of linguist tends to observe change in the language, note it, analyse it and manage not to wake up screaming every night . . . Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, severely prescriptive grammarians would argue that, since they were taught at school in 1943 that you must never start a sentence with “And” or “But”, the modern world is benighted by ignorance and folly, and most of modern literature should be burned.
Ms. Truss illuminates punctuation’s historical context by discussing Britain’s own punctuation erosion that she theorizes stems from a shift in British educational policy in the 1960s. Supposedly, the erosion has reached critical proportions, as evidenced by a brief dialogue the author had with a British school teacher at a book signing. The teacher expressed exasperation at her own lack of punctuation knowledge and described her baffling inability to find resources to learn punctuation rules. In true stickler fashion, Ms. Truss felt like throwing a coat over her head and running from the bookstore screaming.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a British book shot through with a wit that may or may not appeal to some readers. At times, Ms. Truss’ hyperactive wit can be slightly excessive even if it is facetious. As if an Apostrophe Protection Society isn’t extreme enough (and one supposedly exists in Britain), she advocates the idea of a militant wing of the Apostrophe Protection Society. Ms. Truss writes that the society’s tactics of writing polite letters to errants of good punctuation are not enough to stem the tide. Apparently, she feels that military-style criticism is needed to effectively change the punctuation ignorance of British citizens.
In the midst of humorous anecdotes and historical context, this book certainly gives readers the punctuation essentials by providing relatively comprehensive rules for apostrophes, commas, dashes, colons, semicolons, and end marks. These rules include occasional explanations of the differences between American and British punctuation usage, which would be especially helpful to global technical communicators. Perhaps the most well-known difference between American and British usage is the American placement of the period inside quotation marks versus the British placement of the period outside quotation marks. As for differing punctuation labels, Ms. Truss notes that the British call periods “full stops,” exclamation points “exclamation marks,” parentheses “round brackets,” and brackets “square brackets.” And the next time the reader debates the merits of the serial comma, he or she might score points citing the fact that the British call the serial comma an “Oxford comma.” One could argue that if Oxford puts the comma in, why shouldn’t we?
Among the other usage differences the author cites is the use of apostrophes after abbreviations and calendar years (CD’s and 1970’s). The British have weaned themselves off of this rule and so have the Americans to some degree, although, supposedly The New Yorker still uses apostrophes after abbreviations and calendar years. The author also cites that the American use of the colon in time reference (7:30), whereas the British use a period. Little does she know that there is a silent yet widespread punctuation movement here in the United States to use the period in an effort to appear more fashionably European.
The book’s humorous framework of the revolutionary call for sticklers to unite gives the book an immediacy that traditional academic texts lack; the fate of the world seems to hang in the balance. After having read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I found myself one day sitting in traffic on the highway. Looking over at the truck next to me, I saw a bumper sticker that said, “My Heroe’s Have Always Been Cowboys.” I found myself bristling and feeling slightly dejected at the ignorance of the punctuation error and its obvious significance as one sign in the decline of Western civilization. At that moment, I realized that perhaps Eats, Shoots & Leaves is Ms. Truss’ manifesto to recruit new members into her punctuation revolution. She has been successful in turning me into a stickler, and she just might be successful in converting other unsuspecting readers as well.
See you at the revolution!
Justin Baker has been working as a technical writer and technical editor for approximately seven years. He is currently working at the U.S. State Department in Washington, DC, documenting application systems. He can be reached at bakerjustin@earthlink.net.