Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Title: Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Author: Lynne Truss
Published: 2003
Read: Feb 2007
Number of pages: 204
Non-Fiction
Where I obtained the book: Barnes and Noble

How I discovered it: read the first one
My grade: B+

Just with an add of a comma, a panda who eats shoots and leaves and a panda who eats, shoots and leaves are two very different scenarios. In her book about punctuation,  Truss emphasizes that the comma and other punctuation marks are very essential tools when writing and how important it is to use them right! She has a strict, no-nonsense policy when it comes to using any kind of punctuation wrong. She sites an example as having seen signs with "Book's, DVD's, and CD's on sale!" many times. Of course this is wrong because the added apostrophes make the items possessive. 

Let me tell you, bad grammar and incorrect punctuation drive me crazy! The only time I think it's okay to let is slide is when someone is texting. It's a pain in the butt to have write correctly when you're texting, so I don't mind when people don't use commas or capitalization or spell things correctly then. 

However, there really is no excuse for everything else - ESPECIALLY when they know it will be read by the public. I once saw a sign that said "We're glad your here!" and it just made me cringe everytime I passed by it. We're glad your what is here? Really, if you don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" it's time to go back to first grade! 

Something I learned that I didn't know before while reading this book was the Oxford comma. This is the last comma in a list. The title of this book is Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but Eats, Shoots, and Leaves would be correct too and the comma after "Shoots" is called an Oxford comma. 

Sometimes I'll be uncertain about whether a comma goes or if I should have one at all, but for the most part I feel pretty I'm using them correctly. (I hope!)