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Rating:

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is the best book on grammar to date. It’s amazing. It’s interesting. It’s hilarious and filled, absolutely overflowing, with historical asides. How many non-fiction books on grammar are even readable from cover to cover? Most are tolerable solely as reference guides. They can only be stomached five spiritless pages at a time. Truss’ darling book is absolutely nothing like those wretched guides.

Everyone has something to gain from reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves. After all, the book is non-fiction and on grammar: it’s educational. But, it’s educational in an entertaining way. Almost everyone will find something about it enjoyable. Some will LOL in the literal sense. Others will smile amused while others still will blush to themselves, embarrassed at the thought of their own ill-mannered punctuation habits. English majors, history majors, literature buffs, grammar sticklers, and writers will adore this book the most.

Truss discusses commas, periods, semi-colons, colons, dashes, exclamation marks, and the often misused apostrophe. She opens with a humorous anecdote about someone’s satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes in CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s and BOOK’s. Such diabolical apostrophe positioning causes her to act in a righteous manner or rather to act like a vigilante superhero of grammar with a permanent marker as her sidekick…

If you’ve read this book, you know:

1. What the Oxford comma is
2. The secret to proper comma usage (The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person.)
3. The greatness of Aldus Manutius the Elder

Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ segments on email and the Internet are the best. Enjoy this small sampling:

The emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channeling the reader’s attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind. Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What’s this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a pair of eyes. What’s this curvy thing for? It’s a mouth, look! Hey, I think we’re on to something.

In conclusion, Eats, Shoots & Leaves is brilliant. Read it.