A FUNNY Grammar Book (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation - Lynne Truss)

Name: shewhoguards

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation - Lynne Truss
Date:	21/05/08 (44 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can straighten up your grammar knowledge while making you grin

Disadvantages: Too boring for some, not detailed enough for others

I've mentioned in other reviews that I spend a fair bit of my fair time writing for fun. Even if it is for fun, anyone who wants something halfway coherent at some point passes their work to someone else for editing, and the sad fact is that at some point in time unless you're very good your editor will end up threatening to beat you to death with your own commas.

Because the friend I was using for editing loved me, and did not WANT to beat me to death, I discovered in my stocking one year a neat little copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Basically, it's about grammar, but it's a grumpily written book about grammar. The author wanted to keep her audience involved, and to do that she had to know how to laugh at herself, making them smile and wince at the agonies of an inappropriately placed apostrophe.

That said, this book knows its audience and that audience is not "the entire world". There are plenty of people who, no matter how amusingly a book on punctuation is written, won't get past the first chapter. And there are people who are writing professionally who need a proper (and extremely boring) style guide. This book is for those people who lie in between, the cheerful amateurs who remember SOME of the rules from school and care at least enough to make an effort but whose jobs don't depend on them grasping every tiny detail.

I still don't have perfect punctuation (you may have notice, for example, my tendency towards run on sentences). But I managed to finish the book, still smiling, and did at least take away some things like the debate of the Oxford comma and the mysteries of the semi-colon. For £7 that's pretty good.

Summary: If you're in the intended audience it's great