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244 of 313 people found the following review helpful:
It's not clever and it's not funny., 16 Mar 2004
It is a good thing that a book on punctuation is a best-seller; it’s just a pity it’s this one. All the good work Lynne Truss does in conveying her message (viz., punctuation matters) is undone by her hectoring tone, dismal attempts at humour (made worse by a tendency to point out the punch-lines) and, in the final analysis, lack of credibility: having set out rules she then reverses over them, makes egregious appeals to authority and, every now and then, just gets things flat out wrong. You might forgive that were there any humility in her prose, but there isn’t. The first rule of hubris is: if you’re going to be a clever-clogs, make sure you’re right, because readers won’t cut you any slack if you’re not. Lynne Truss isn't always right. A case in point: in her introduction, Truss states (rather presumptuously) on behalf of her fellow sticklers, “we got very worked up after 9/11 not because of Osama bin-Laden but because people on the radio kept saying “enormity” when they meant “magnitude”, and we hate that”. Now ignoring the curious impression this creates of Truss’s value scheme, she is quite wrong to take umbrage here: "Enormity", in British English, means "extreme wickedness". The magnitude and the awfulness of an act of mass murder are closely correlated. So, even in British English, it is perfectly right to talk of the "enormity" of September 11. But if any of the voices Truss heard on the radio were American, they had another excuse. In American English enormity *does* mean "magnitude". Since Truss is so enamoured with appeals to authority, it is odd she didn't check that with the best authority on American English, Webster's dictionary. When she does make them, Truss's appeals to authority are even more irritating, particularly where they contradict her own rules or justify her own errors: So, the author patiently explains that an apostrophe is required to indicate possession except in the case of a possessive pronoun (i.e., "mine", "yours", "his", "hers", "its", "ours" and "theirs"). Now, I had always wondered why a possessive "its" doesn’t have an apostrophe, and this explains it nicely. But then Truss completely undermines her own rule and appeals to the authority of Virginia Woolf: "Someone wrote to say that my use of "one’s" was wrong ("a common error"), and that it should be "ones". This is such rubbish that I refuse to argue about it. Go and tell Virginia Woolf it should be "A Room of Ones Own" and see how far you get." Virginia Woolf's been dead for over fifty years, so this is pretty tough to do. But it doesn't mean Virginia Woolf was right. And Truss fails explain why this is "such rubbish". Finally, even the book’s title betrays the author’s questionable sense of humour. I don't think she gets the joke. It has nothing to do with waiters or pistols (perhaps a maiden aunt told her that one?) and certainly doesn't need a “badly punctuated wildlife manual” to work, because it isn’t a grammatical play; it’s an oral one. The joke doesn’t work when you write it down, precisely because of the ambiguous comma. You have to say it out loud (in spoken English, there is no punctuation at all). I hope they re-title the New Zealand edition of this book, because the local version of the joke (which employs a delightful expression from NZ English) is funnier: The Kiwi, it is said, is the most anti-social bird in the bush, and no-one likes to invite it to parties, because, if it turns up at all, it just eats roots and leaves. The joke’s about shagging, Lynne.
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26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointing, 11 Feb 2004
By A Customer
I was looking forward to reading this book, but it was not as enjoyable as it should have been. While there are many humorous and informative passages, the overall tone is spoiled by the author's repeated reference to "stupid" usage; it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. I also found the sense of panic (as if there were only one-hundred mating-pairs of apostrophes left in the wild) a little grating toward the end.
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55 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
Not up to the hype, 10 Feb 2004
Everybody who is anybody seems to be reading it. Or is this another Steven Hawkins' 'A Brief History of Time' - fashionably intellectual - a book to be seen with, just don't try to read it.I was hoping for a light-hearted discussion on the rise-and-fall of English punctuation, with the same light touch and dry humour of a Bill Bryson; or at least a decent instruction manual for those of us who can't seem to work out whether to use a colon, semi-colon, comma or full stop. Instead we are treated to the author's pet rant about the demise of absolute punctuation. And whilst several of the example errors were humourous, many just left me cold. It strikes me that the author knows everything about language and nothing about people. This book treats English like a computer language - rigid, unforgiving, and only truly understood by a tiny minority. I am sure it must be amusing to point intellectual fingers at those poor, sad individuals who still don't know whether and where to use an apostrophe for a possesive plural noun or not, but it's not something I want to engage in. I would rather take an interesting book, bad grammar or not, over this drivel. Sometimes it is the very ambiguity in English that makes our enjoyment of communication complete: language is not perfect, because it is a human construct. Save your money, buy Bill Bryson's books instead - they are both entertaining and enlightening. PS: please excuse any errors in spelling or grammar but, frankly, they're my mistakes and I love them.
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12 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Annoying, 3 Jan 2005
I'd seen some of the hype surrounding this book, so I was looking forward to a good read. Unfortunately, I found the book a little annoying and patronising. I felt that the author was trying to demonstrate her superior command of grammar, rather than make a genuinely readable book.However, any attempt to improve the punctation ability of the nation should be applauded, and I do refer to it occasionally for punctuation help. Buy it as a reference, not as a cover-to-cover read.
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54 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
Sometimes amusing, sometimes interesting, never complete, 4 Feb 2004
Eats, Shoots and Leaves makes for a sometimes amusing, sometimes very interesting history of grammar; but then Truss goes and spoils it all with the odd incomplete lesson. The result is a work that is neither here nor there. As a writer, I found much of the history of grammar genuinely informative – the more you know about where rules come from the better you use them – the humour was okay but not quite me. (Many of the examples of misuse have a made up quality to them; they are so very bizarre.)Somebody hoping to improve their English, must surely finish disappointed given the patchy approach to explaining the conventions of the language. Most unfortunate, is an error in explaining the apostrophe (despite a lengthy rant on the subject); this also illustrates the flaw in Truss’s approach. For those that are interested, the error concerns the word “its”. We are correctly told that when something belongs to a thing (i.e. an it) we use “its something” with no apostrophe. This is one of the occasions where Truss offers no explanation for the rule and you’d think she would, given that this is a special rule. I suspect that she simply doesn’t know why, because she goes on to rubbish the comments of one of her Daily Telegraph column readers. They told her that “one’s”, as in “one’s something” (where something belongs to oneself) should not have an apostrophe. The Telegraph reader was correct; “its” has no apostrophe because “it” is always singular and so nobody is going to mistake the word “its” for meaning lots of things, because if there was more than one thing you’d describe them as “they” or “them”. Similarly, nobody is going to confuse “ones” for meaning lots of people, because “one” is, by definition, singular and if there were one of you, you’d say “our”. So to conclude, if “its” is correct, and we to be consistent, then “ones” is also correct and Truss is wrong.
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8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Informative, but sadly dull, dull, dull, 8 Dec 2004
I should, perhaps, have ignored the hype. I should have known that a book about punctuation would be a trifle dull. And yet I bought the book - I fell for the publicity and the glimpse of risque humour apparent from the front cover. I have to say, in my defence and of course in support of the book, that it is informative. It got across some of the principle rules of punctuation better than any of my English teachers at school. However, it just isn't very interesting. It doesn't stand on its own two feet as a story, or as humour. To be honest, given the author's incessant procrastination in every chapter - an attempt at making me laugh, I think - it doesn't really work as a good reference book either. It will sit proudly upon my bookshelf - but I don't think I'll ever pick it up again. And that is a rare thing in my house! You could buy it.... I am just not sure why you would.
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64 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
laughter as status symbol, 4 Dec 2003
It's amusing, but the amusement is vitiated by the scorn which the author heaps upon the uninformed. There's a not-so-fine line between criticising a society for its lack of exactitude and making fun of those who innocently repeat what they have been taught. Two probably out-of-print books set about this task with more detail, modesty and precision: (1) Sir Ernest Gower's _Plain Words_, once an official civil service handbook, and (2) Robert Graves' and Alan Hodge's _The Reader Over Your Shoulder_, an utterly brilliant analysis of literary style, with many examples from established authors, which set out to correct the errors in logic of which bad grammar is often merely a symptom.
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6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Given up already., 17 Aug 2007
I've given up on this book after one sitting. I can put up with the tone of the book, though it's a little annoying to keep raging about how many people misuse the apostrophe.
What annoyed me more was that in a book that spends the first 27 pages (that's as far as I got) complaining about bad grammar and spelling, there's a typo and a missed capital letter. "All I can say *it*, don't come running to us, because we will disown you." Then, in a sentence about capitalisation no less, the author refers to the internet, not the Internet. Zero tolerance approach you say?
I accept that this is excessively picky, and I'm usually happy to ignore the odd typo in a book, but it's hard to take advice about people's poor use of grammar and punctuation when there are editorial errors. Physician, heal thyself.
It's not unfunny, I'll give it that, but it comes across as slightly Radio 4 listening, broadsheet reading superiority complex, and it's only 204 pages.
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23 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
Rather Pointless!, 28 Sep 2004
This is a light-hearted look at the subject of punctuation which is neither particularly funny (although it tries to be), nor is it particularly comprehensive on its subject matter (which again it doesn't really aspire to).The result is a rather rambling and unsatisfactory look at most of our punctuation characters. The book aims to go nowhere in particular - and, in that, it meets its aim.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
But remember: This is not a reputable grammar source., 18 Dec 2005
While this may be a wonderfully humorous book, it still cannot compete with the major grammar resources for writers and editors. I realize Ms Truss is a writer, and her bio does state that she was also an editor (though, it does not state for how long or how successful she was). However, as the major, glaring, punctuational error on the front cover proves, even writers need editors . . . and apparently, so do editors. I am frustrated with the number of writers who quote "Eat Shoots and Leaves" as an argument for why they can stick a comma any darn place they please. This book does quote some of the same rules I find in the reputable sources; however, it conflicts in others. It looks as though Ms Truss was tired of the editors telling her to remove her commas and decided to write a book to back up her own argument. I would not recommend this book unless, perhaps, you want a laugh. I would never dishonor the valid resource books I own by placing this on the same shelf.
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