British and American wordsmiths have put Eats, Shoots & Leaves on international best-seller lists.
Written by former editor Lynne Truss of England, the book is about The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation--not about the diet of a panda falsely labeled homicidal because of a misplaced comma.
Truss cites hilarious abuses of dashes, semicolons, colons, exclamation marks (points), hyphens, full stops (periods), ellipses, round brackets (parentheses)—and, especially, commas and apostrophes—on both sides of the pond in literature, signage, television and e-mail communications.
While guardians of The King’s English may consider her book to be the last word on usage in Great Britain, The Editor has different recommendations for domestic writers:
--Roy H. Copperud’s American Usage and Style (The Consensus), published by Van Nostrand Reinhold Co. in 1980.
--The 1970 Associated Press Stylebook. Avoid later editions, which cave in to pressures from the illiterate masses. (16 MAY 2004)
