Eats Shoots, Leaves By Lynne Truss: Chapter Summary

Correct punctuation is the focus of the book Eats, Shoots, Leaves by Lynne Truss, a self-labeled "zero tolerance approach to punctuation" (Truss). Grammarian, Lynne Truss, attempts to interest the everyday reader in punctuation by using comical situations and correcting popular signs and slogans. Her "inner stickler", however, makes the book come across as pretentious and aggravating to the non-sticklers of the world. Truss uses inappropriate examples such as sticklers getting "very worked up after 9/11 not because of Osama bin-Laden but because people on the radio kept saying 'enormity' when they meant 'magnitude'," since sticklers "really hate that" (Truss 5). The breakdown of the most popular forms of punctuation are useful, but made barely readable due to the author's sense of humor and pretentiousness regarding the subject.

Obvious ones like commas and apostrophes get their own chapter, whereas hyphens and dashes combine into one and their uses are compared. Truss's thoughts, the origin story of each mark, other authors' thoughts, and examples of each punctuation mark are in each chapter and they usually end with a call-to-action from Lynne Truss to use punctuation correctly before it dies out. The book, however, has its faults according to Louis Menand, who thinks "the most objectionable thing about Truss's writing is its inconsistency" (Menand). The author of Eats, Shoots, Leaves would sometimes break her own rules or assume certain rules apply in America, but not in her home country of England, which would end up not being