Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Subtitle: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Edition: 1st American printing (24)
Publisher: Gotham Books
Published: 2004-04
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 209
ISBN-13: 9781592400874
Copyright date: 2004
Subjects: English language -- Punctuation
Other titles: Eats, shoots, and leaves
First sentence: Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't.
Description: In 2002 Lynne Truss presented Cutting a Dash, a well-received BBC Radio 4 series about punctuation ("A sparkling series of essays"--The Daily Telegraph), which led to the writing of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. 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). 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!"

Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now "txt msgs," we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & 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. If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. 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.
--front flap
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-209).
Originally published in Great Britain in 2003 by Profile Books.
Table of contents: title: Foreword by Frank McCourt
pagenum: xi; title: Publisher's Note
pagenum: xv; title: Preface
pagenum: xvii; title: Introduction - The Seventh Sense
pagenum: 1; title: The Tractable Apostrophe
pagenum: 35; title: That'll Do, Comma
pagenum: 68; title: Airs and Graces
pagenum: 103; title: Cutting a Dash
pagenum: 132; title: A Little Used Punctuation Mark
pagenum: 168; title: Merely Conventional Signs
pagenum: 177; title: Bibliography
pagenum: 205