Eats, Shoots and Leaves

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Fourth Estate, 2009 - Humor - 209 pages

Anxious about the apostrophe? Confused by the comma? Stumped by the semicolon? Join Lynne Truss on a hilarious tour through the rules of punctuation that is sure to sort the dashes from the hyphens.



We all had the basic rules of punctuation drilled into us at school, but punctuation pedants have good reason to suspect they never sank in. 'Its Summer!' screams a sign that sets our teeth on edge. 'Pansy's ready', we learn to our considerable interest ('Is she?') as we browse among the bedding plants.

It is not only the rules of punctuation that have come under attack but also a sense of why they matter. In this runaway bestseller, Lynne Truss takes the fight to emoticons and greengrocers' apostrophes with a war cry of 'Sticklers unite!'

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About the author (2009)

Lynne Truss was born on May 31, 1955, in Kingston upon Thames, England. She is an English writer and journalist. Her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was a best-seller in 2003. Truss received a first-class honors degree in English Language and Literature from University College London in 1977. After graduation, she worked for the Radio Times as a sub-editor before moving to the Times Higher Education Supplement as the deputy literary editor in 1978. From 1986 to 1990, she was the literary editor of The Listener and was an arts and books reviewer for The Independent on Sunday before joining The Times in 1991. She currently reviews books for The Sunday Times. She has also written numerous books including Tennyson's Gift; Going Loco; Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation; and Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.