Eats Shoots & Leaves

I have been reading a book about punctuation - wondering if it would have been a good one to recommend to my students back in my teaching days. The answer, in short, is NO! Too many words... as funny as they are!

Written by an editor who finds mistakes in punctuation very annoying, its subtitle is: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation!

Think crazy lady with a black marker going around correcting punctuation errors in signs... as I have sometimes been tempted to do!

Reading the book, I've discovered that I'm a "stickler"  - and the humor in the book (which makes it a British best-seller) comes from the author's descriptions of her extreme reactions to seeing incorrect punctuation in public places.

Like her, in my teaching days, I may have screamed inwardly at some of the mistakes my students made. (And once I wrote a  blog post about a punctuation error painted on the side of a catering truck.) But, unlike the author, I have never demonstrated outside a theater holding an apostrophe on a stick, to show passers-by that the title of the play needs an apostrophe!

The book does have interesting examples of miscommunication when punctuation is off. They would have been interesting examples to use in my teaching days. The book's title itself is one: Eats Shoots & Leaves.

• Did someone eat, then shoot, then leave?
• Does the person (or animal) eat shoots and leaves?
• Or, combining both, did someone eat shoots and then leave?

I'm only about a third of the way through the book, and I have already learned that a comma in a list before the "and" (which I assumed is incorrect) is called an Oxford comma. Also that Americans put the punctuation inside a quotation mark, while the British put it afterwards...

She replied: "That's not right." (American)
She replied: "That's not right". (British)

I used to write it the British way, but assumed it was wrong. It isn't, apparently. At least, not in Britain.

The book would be most enjoyed by people who have some sense of punctuation and want to make sure they are getting it right... Also teachers, editors and others who have to regularly correct punctuation errors...

And I do have one (punctuation) criticism of the book: Shouldn't the subtitle be: "... a Zero-Tolerance Approach..." with a hyphen between zero and tolerance?!