Eats, Shoots & Leaves

"Eats, Shoots & Leaves"....where to begin. I saw this review somewhere (I wish I could remember where) and it summed it up nicely for me: "The good news for us grammar sticklers is that a book on grammar is a best seller. The bad news is that it's 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves'...."

I could start with the title, which isn't even grammatically incorrect, only misleading (It would make sense in a larger context, such as: Sleeps, 12 hours a day; eats, shoots and leaves; mates, once a year...etc). In British English, you omit the serial comma before the 'and' so it becomes "eats, shoots, and leaves" but in American English you don't. The book was written by a British author, and it wasn't changed for publication in the U.S., so there are a number of places where it's just....WRONG...for American grammar. And even for British grammar, it is not internally consistent within the book itself. Sigh.

I hesitate to even mention the punctuation game on the book's website (except of course that I just did), and how it has ERRORS IN GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION on it. This is a book on punctuation, and ON THE WEBSITE it has errors.

In the Apostrophe section:
"Four yards' worth"
This is an example of British punctuation versus American punctuation. In American punctuation, it would be "Four yards worth". Sigh.

In the Comma section, it's worse. It starts saying: "If you don't think a comma is NEEDED anywhere click the NO COMMA button." (emphasis on NEEDED mine)
We have:
"Stop, or I'll scream."
A comma indicates a pause. In this sentence, I think the pause is clearly optional.

"Of course, there weren't enough tickets to go round."
First of all, it would be 'round because it's short for around and contractions require apostrophes to indicate where the omitted letters were. Second, this sentence could be read as exasperation, meaning "Of course" isn't set off on its own.

Finally, if you miss three, you see:
"You're a 83% STICKLER!"
which should be:
"You're AN 83% STICKLER!" (emphasis mine)
whether you're British or not.

Personally, I think I'm a 100% stickler. Anyway...

Here's a great review from the New Yorker. It's interesting to observe that as written communication becomes more important, people's ability to write is decreasing. Blame e-mail, or Internet chat, or cell-phone text messaging (where brevity outweighs correctness), but more and more I see people unable to string literate sentences together. Which is OK with me, since it inevitably means there will be less competent competition for me when I become a writer. And yet, I weep for future generations. Sigh.