Steve Fesenmaier writes “So it has been a shock to the rarefied system of Ms. Truss, 48, that her book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance
Approach to Punctuation,” has become this year’s surprise No. 1 best seller here. Among the legions of the surprised are the
executives at her publishing house, Profile Books, who ordered a modest initial printing of 15,000 books, but now have
510,000 in print; and Ms. Truss’s friends and family.
NYTimes Has The Story.”
I wonder what she has to say about “Colons: When Is Enough, Enough” or “Colons: The Spam of Punctuation”
Punctuation is not pointless!
I hope this book will catch on in the US as well when it is released here. May we hope for a revival of Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s fabulous books as a result?
Colons and more
I got this book for Hanukkah; my wife special ordered it from the U.K. (I’m one of the sticklers Truss talks about.) All my pet peeves are here — misused apostrophes (especially “it’s” for the possessive), gratuitous quotation marks, etc. If that’s not enough, you can look forward to reading how Sir Roger Casement’s 1916 treason conviction hung on a comma and how, in 2003, the British government’s Iraq dossier was exposed as a hack job by a “yob’s comma.”
As for colons, Truss distinguishes between the “Yes!” type and the “Ah” type.