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. These books do their job but somehow punctuation abuse does not diminish.
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. We see signs in shops every day for "Banana's" and even "Gateaux's". 'Large black and white mammal native to China. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual, and walked out. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. 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. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. 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. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. 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!
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). 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.
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