I know from conversations with colleagues that I’m not the only proposal manager to have been challenged at some point by a content contributor bearing a copy of the ghastly “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, published a couple of years back. They’ll argue over some obscure proofreading point or other – when they’d be far better off focusing on improving the inherent quality of their content!

Huge, huge kudos to author Lynne Truss for managing to sell hundreds of thousands of a book about punctuation. But those of you who share my dislike for its sometimes-overly-fussy approach might enjoy Louis Menand’s brilliantly scathing review from The New Yorker:

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there.

Both the book itself (for all my reservations) and (especially) this particular deprecating review are great reading for anyone who loves writing.