Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss

Lynne Truss is a very funny woman. This is, by far, the funniest book on punctuation I've ever read. An explanation of the book's title may be found at the back of the cover.

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."

Now who doesn't want to read it with a blurb like that?

After the jump, dry notes from the book.


The Apostrophe

1. It indicates the possessive
_____The children's playground

2. It indicates time or quantity
_____ Two week's notice

3. It indicates the omission of figures in dates
_____ Summer of '68

4. It indicates the omission of letters
_____ I s'pose we could've lived in S'pore

5. It indicates strange non-standard English

6. It features in Irish names such as O'Neill.

7. It indicates the plural of letters
_____ How many f's are there in Fulham?

8. It indicates the plural of words
_____ What are the do's and don't's?

Notes on the Comma

1. Comma Splice
_____ Where a comma is used in place of a semi-colon

2. Oxford Comma
_____This is the comma before "and" in a list, for example, "red, blue, and white".
_____The Oxford comma is hugely contested; although, I do have a preference for it.

3. Only use a comma when it modifies the same thing to the same degree.
_____ It was a dark, stormy night.
_____ He was a tall, bearded man.

_____ It was an endangered white rhino.
_____ The grand old Duke of York had ten thousand men.