The Misuse of Punctuation Marks in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a Book by Lynne Truss Essay

Eats, Shoots Leaves reflectionEats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss is a humorous book bemoaning the misuse of punctuation marks. It functions as a pseudo style guide, detailing the authors intended correct way. Truss describes some of the popular punctuation mistakes she sees in writing. She follows this up with a series of humorous anecdotes and descriptions of how the mistakes violate British punctuation standards. The chapters in the book are divided into the punctuation mark(s) each chapter will cover one about apostrophes, one about commas, etc.Truss starts out with a relatively simple mark the apostrophe. Various usages are described and explained such as using apostrophes for plurals (no), possessive apostrophes (Do I refer to the book as Trusss book or Truss book? Its Trusss book), and general-purpose omission apostrophes (try not to invent new omissions if youre not Shakespeare). The rules for using apostrophes are not numerous, if not always intuitively obvious how they work. The book does well at explaining these rules.The second chapter deals with the comma, and this is where the heart of the book really lies. Apostrophe errors rarely change the meaning of a sentence, even if they make it harder to understand. The chickens lay there eggs, while ghastly to read, is nevertheless understandable. But, as the title shows us, commas can really change the meaning of a sentence a panda that eats shoots and leaves is far less dangerous than a panda that eats, shoots and leaves. There are too many examples to put them all down in a summary but Truss explains them well. The remaining chapters of the book cover colons, semicolons, hyphens, etc. in a similar format.This book is clearly targeted at a British audience. While I appreciate the work that went into the book, and I respect the publishers decision to retain all British punctuation conventions, some of Trusss qualms are actually about British people adopting American standards, e.g. this passageAsk Young people...