Eats, Shoots And Leaves: Chapter Analysis

In her humorous punctuation manual, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, British author and former BBC Radio 4 host Lynne Truss describes various scenarios in which punctuation can have a major impact on the readability of a written text. The book was published in late 2003, when texting was just becoming part of mainstream communications, perhaps contributing to the demise of punctuation in the United Kingdom and the United States. Truss wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves not to criticize or condemn technological advances like texting, but to offer a gentle reminder of the purpose of punctuation and the potential misinterpretations that may arise in the absence of punctuation. She appeals to a wide audience, both socially and geographically, because her message …show more content…
The format of the book is essentially the same throughout, with only a few minor variations. First, Truss opens each chapter with either a personal story, an example of incorrect usage from popular culture, or, in the case of the chapter “Cutting a Dash,” a little-known parody of a well-known story that readers may not be familiar with. Truss usually proceeds to share some insight about the chapter’s introduction or how it relates to readers. In the case of Perekladin, the central figure in the introduction to “Cutting a Dash,” who had never had reason to express anything “relating…to the ‘delight, indignation, joy, rage, and other feelings’ an exclamation mark is in the business of denoting” (Truss 133), Truss juxtaposes Perekladin’s experience with disuse of punctuation with those readers who “can’t remember a time before we learned to punctuate” (Truss 134). After her analysis, Truss proceeds to convey the rules of a particular punctuation mark, however many there may be. Truss also exemplifies many of the rules, such as “’I could really do with some Opal Fruits!’” when listing that an exclamation mark can be used “to make a commonplace sentence more emphatic” (Truss 138). Once she has given the rules for a punctuation mark, Truss usually follows with more exemplification or additional contextual information, such as differences between British and American uses of punctuation marks. For example, Truss writes of the placement of the period in relation to the quotation marks used often in texts; she describes a “gulf between American usage and our own, with ...American grammarians insisting that, if a sentence ends with a phrase in inverted commas [closing quotation marks], all the terminal punctuation…must come tidily inside the speech marks, even when this doesn’t seem to make sense” (Truss