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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The first punctuation mistake in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it's hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.
The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause ("I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn't know what to do with") and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe ("printers' marks") and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as "of course" are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not. Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases ("Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions"), before correlative conjunctions ("Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't"), and in prepositional phrases ("including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final 's' "). Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: "You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors."
Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: "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)." Citation form varies: one passage from the Bible is identified as "Luke, xxiii, 43" and another, a page later, as "Isaiah xl, 3." The word "abuzz" is printed with a hyphen, which it does not have. We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write "Who said 'I cannot tell a lie?' ") A line from "My Fair Lady" is misquoted ("The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning"). And it is stated that...
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