Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

This is one of those books that one should read over and over again and to quote Newsweek review of it, you could say “You don’t need to be a grammar nerd to enjoy it.” I have bought it by accident in NY only because I found its cover really intriguing.

The book is about punctuation and proves that it really matters a lot where a comma is placed in a sentence.

To give you just a taste of what the book is like:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

‘Why?’ asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards

the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

‘I’m a panda,’ he says at the door. ‘Look it up.’

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.’

It was a page-turner and an eye-opener for me, so I could recommend it to anybody who teaches, learns or is simply interested in English.

Recently I’ve found a version of the book  for kids which is filled with lovely illustrations just like those:

So-   'STICKLERS, UNITE!'