Eats, Shoots & Leaves

In her book, Truss details the state of punctuation in the United Kingdom and the United States. Her goal is to remind her readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language by mixing humor and instruction. Each chapter is devoted to at least one punctuation topic: apostrophes; commas; semicolons and colons; dashes; and hyphens. She touches on varied aspects of the history of punctuation, including many thoroughly-researched anecdotes, adding another dimension to her explanation of grammatical rules. In the book's final chapter, Truss explains the importance of maintaining punctuation rules and touches on the effects of email and the Internet on punctuation.

The book is named after a popular joke involving punctuation:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Much to the surprise of the publisher and author, when it was first published in 2003 in the United Kingdom, the book was a huge commercial success. Then, in 2004, the U.S. edition became a New York Times bestseller. The book has become such a success that it now even has its own interactive punctuation website [1]. Contrary to usual publishing convention, the U.S. edition of the book left the original British conventions intact.

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