Eats, shoots and leaves me irritated
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.
This article was written by Jon on 22 August, 2006 and filed under Word play & writing. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
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