dystopia

Eats, Shoot & Leaves is a book about grammar and the fact that our society is still for the most part illiterate when it comes down to how to correctly use grammar. The book was tastefully written and I found it to be fairly humorous throughout. The author, Lynne Truss, goes over the proper way to use several punctuation marks; including the colon, the semicolon, the comma, the question mark, the exclamation mark, the ellipsis, the dash and brackets. It is definitely a good book to have to brush up on proper grammar and it also serves as a reminder that we cannot do without these marks. We cannot do without these marks because our language would not sound right to the reader, everything would be in disarray. Truss definitely illustrates how it seems like less people are using grammar correctly and she ponders on what the future may hold for our generation of people who text shorthand language and send e-mail with little to no correct punctuation. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who is an English major or just enjoys grammar and knowing the proper usage.

The joke at the beginning of the book titled Eats, shoots and leaves:

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.

So punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.