Eats, Shoots and Leaves

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Lynne Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves

LYNNE TRUSS. Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Introduction – The Seventh Sense

The Tractable Apostrophe

That’ll Do, Comma

Airs and Graces

Cutting a Dash

A Little Used Punctuation Mark

Merely Conventional Signs

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the same author

From the reviews of Eats, Shoots & Leaves:

About the Publisher

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The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

FOURTH ESTATE • London

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Luckily for me, I was exceptionally interested in English and got there in the end. While other girls were out with boyfriends on Sunday afternoons, getting their necks disfigured by love bites, I was at home with the wireless listening to an Ian Messiter quiz called Many a Slip, in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in pieces of prose. It was a fantastic programme. I dream sometimes they have brought it back. Panel-lists such as Isobel Barnett and David Nixon would interrupt Roy Plomley with a buzz and say “Tautology!” Around this same time, when other girls of my age were attending the Isle of Wight Festival and having abortions, I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has). Funny how I didn’t think any of this was peculiar at the time, when it was behaviour with “Proto Stickler” written all over it. But I do see now why it was no accident that I later wound up as a sub-editor with a literal blue pencil.

But to get back to those dark-side-of-the-moon years in British education when teachers upheld the view that grammar and spelling got in the way of self-expression, it is arguable that the timing of their grammatical apathy could not have been worse. In the 1970s, no educationist would have predicted the explosion in universal written communication caused by the personal computer, the internet and the key-pad of the mobile phone. But now, look what’s happened: everyone’s a writer! Everyone is posting film reviews on Amazon that go like this:

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