Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Reviewed by PETER CALDER


That's the trouble with writing about punctuation: the most meticulous writer can make errors that the most exacting editing and proofreading can miss. Then reviewers even more pedantic than the gloriously precise author of this highly entertaining book become obsessed by the little it gets wrong and ignore the huge swathes of stuff it gets marvellously, triumphantly right.

But to note a glaring error in the title is not to nitpick. "Zero tolerance" is what is known as a noun phrase. When it is used adjectivally and precedes the noun it qualifies, it must be hyphenated. Truss acknowledges as much on page 172, requiring the punctuation "a stainless-steel kitchen" and "the seven-o'clock train" and, although she notes that the rule is "less rigorously applied than it used to be", she observes it elsewhere in the text, referring to "stream-of-consciousness writing" and "pickled-herring merchant". Worse, she entitles the chapter about the hyphen, "a little used punctuation mark" which is almost the opposite of what she means and there is no sign of intentional irony.

Under normal circumstances, the fact that the book was not described as a "zero-tolerance guide" would have prompted me to leave it on the shelf, just as I refuse to enter cafes that serve "cappucino" or "pizza's". But to have done so would have meant missing out on a generally delightful read.

Truss, like many of us, was outraged by a huge poster for an idiotic film entitled Two Weeks Notice. ("Would they have called it One Weeks Notice?" she wails). The sight of it gave her "a very nasty turn" and so she wrote a book that will give heart to sticklers everywhere who despair at potato's and the indiscriminate interchange of "its" and "it's", never mind singular criteria and phenomena or those checkout queues for shoppers with "eight items or less".

The style tends at times towards the jolly-hockey-sticks but in seven very readable chapters over 200 pages, she covers the history, theory and practice of punctuation. In the process she sounds a rallying cry for those who share her view that punctuation is important because "without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning".

Buy it for a stickler you love. Then, if you're not a stickler, borrow it and read it.

Publisher: Profile

Price: $35