Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a comical, annotated piece of a written material that takes upon commonly punctuation mistakes and in some manner makes fun of them so as to drive or rather invite in the correct punctuation1.
Truss’ well-used humor and non-tolerant approach to the details of correcting any written material that she comes across (from a simple grocer’s sign or a lengthy novel) will, in some way, stir up a craze for the little or tiny punctuation marks that we use subconsciously, without even considering their value. Truss’ book contains a short overview of a history of the many punctuation marks that we use in the present day; mistakes that people make often and rather easy rules to make us remember how to use those particular punctuation marks. In a summarised statement, Truss’ book tells about the evolution of punctuation marks and how they were supposed to help a reader to process what is being read and to make reading more smooth and bearable2.
Lynn Truss brings out the idea that the improper use of punctuation has spread widely, and people are growing less and less concerned about it every day. She says that even the establishments that are supposed to use correct punctuation have failed greatly in this area. The newspapers are also included to such establishments. The author goes ahead to tell us how inappropriate use of commas and full stops has spread widely in e-mails, newspapers and recently in text messages.
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Eats, Shoots and Leaves commences with an introduction talking about the seventh sense. It says that punctuation perfectionists make the impression of being tormented or agonised when seeing incorrectly punctuated words and sentences.
Truss, however, argues and convinces readers that this is something to be renewed, even though, she admits, this hinders a language from evolving; the author then says that the evolution of a language should not be due to the lack of an education or laziness.
For example, in order to show how perfectionists cannot stand errors in punctuations, Lynn Truss gives an example of how she has the urge to correct sentences and paragraphs that are meant to put a point in a given question and are later in the book put in a grammatical context. The author also emphasizes on how vital it is in getting meanings of sentences or words. She urges her readers in the Seventh Sense to take an exercise that is guaranteed to bring out an inner stickler. She says that one should drive through or take a walk in ones village, a town or a city and take a look at advertisements that have been wrongly punctuated. Truss says that it is very possible to find what she describes as ‘‘idiotic sign writing’. The author also writes that it is not only in advertisements that one finds errors in punctuations, but also in newspapers. She says that in a newspaper it is very easy to spot something like ‘‘DEAD SON PHOTOS MAY BE RELEASED.’’ In the Seventh Sense, Lynn Truss shows how feelings of sticklers are easily aroused by a normal talk that seems correct but is grammatically wrong due to the punctuation. A sentence, she continues, such as ‘‘thank god its Friday’’ arouses different feelings such as disparity and violence – this is due to the lack of the apostrophe. These mistakes, she says, are extremely easy to grasp.
In the Seventh Sense, one can be astonished by not only how many of us use punctuations wrongly, but also how punctuations are used correctly7.
Unlike many other punctuation books, when one starts reading the Seventh Sense, delight and satisfaction are the feelings one gets due to the use of wit, which shows how the book is well-screened and knowledgeable, and also this helps a reader to became better in grammar and sort of a stickler.