Eats, Shoots and Leaves : The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

In 2002 Lynne Truss presented Cutting a Dash, a BBC Radio 4 series about punctuation.
Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now "txt msgs," we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From George Orwell shunning the semicolon, to New Yorker editor Harold Ross's epic arguments with James Thurber over commas, this history makes a case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil and then got sidetracked. The author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times (London), followed by four (rather peculiar) years as a sports columnist for the same newspaper. She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Women's Journal. She now reviews books for The Sunday Times (London) and is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Brighton, England.