The Hit-and-Run Panda
“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.’”
Have you ever been confused about where a comma is to be properly placed? Then Eats, Shoots and Leaves will help.
Have you ever gotten so frustrated with the incorrect usage of punctuation which runs rampant in our society that you have desired to join an underground militia set on preserving the apostrophe by armed force? Then Lynn Truss is the author for you.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves by British author Lynne Truss swept the British bestseller list and my perception of punctuation along with it. Formerly, I hated punctuation, but with my renewing interest in the English language and the help of this book, I kindled a passion for linguistic expression through punctuation. Imagine that, using non-verbal, non-lexical symbols to convey meaning!
Truss’ fervor, perhaps zealotry, for re-educating native English speakers thrives throughout the entirety of the book, which forces bursts of laughter at random intervals. I literally “laughed out loud” while reading this book.
For a taste of her humor, Truss dedicates the book “To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution.”
More than humor sets this book apart. Truss first tackles the daunting task of determining positions of apostrophes (for which, there exists a special organization named the “Apostrophe Protection Society”), continues to commas, prances on to the poetic nature of colons and semicolons, differentiates between dashes and hyphens, and vociferates on the variety of other punctuation marks.
After reading this book, if anyone tells you that punctuation plays a minor role to the chosen words of a sentence or passage, you will roar back at their ignorance. Truss quotes Eric Partridge from his book You Have a Point There, that “using colons in your writing is the equivalent of playing the piano with crossed hands.” She disagrees with him, but in my view, his words can be twisted for our own use.
I retort: many piano pieces call for the right of left hand to cross over the other for a brief time. This gives the piece a higher level of difficulty, but also increases the skill required to play it and the artistic presentation produced. Thus, appropriately placed colons, and semicolons alike, display a writer’s skill to the world and place an “air” of sophistication on the sentence.
Even if you have no desire to master the English language, read this book; you will pick up a solid grasp of the basics while getting a good laugh. For the lovers of the English language, read this book; your love will grow and flourish to accent your writing with small, but hearty embellishments. Overall, the panda wins.
In a related topic, check out an article about blogging and punctuation by Jennifer Garrett titled, Eats, Blogs and Leaves .
Have you ever been confused about where a comma is to be properly placed? Then Eats, Shoots and Leaves will help.
Have you ever gotten so frustrated with the incorrect usage of punctuation which runs rampant in our society that you have desired to join an underground militia set on preserving the apostrophe by armed force? Then Lynn Truss is the author for you.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves by British author Lynne Truss swept the British bestseller list and my perception of punctuation along with it. Formerly, I hated punctuation, but with my renewing interest in the English language and the help of this book, I kindled a passion for linguistic expression through punctuation. Imagine that, using non-verbal, non-lexical symbols to convey meaning!
Truss’ fervor, perhaps zealotry, for re-educating native English speakers thrives throughout the entirety of the book, which forces bursts of laughter at random intervals. I literally “laughed out loud” while reading this book.
For a taste of her humor, Truss dedicates the book “To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution.”
More than humor sets this book apart. Truss first tackles the daunting task of determining positions of apostrophes (for which, there exists a special organization named the “Apostrophe Protection Society”), continues to commas, prances on to the poetic nature of colons and semicolons, differentiates between dashes and hyphens, and vociferates on the variety of other punctuation marks.
After reading this book, if anyone tells you that punctuation plays a minor role to the chosen words of a sentence or passage, you will roar back at their ignorance. Truss quotes Eric Partridge from his book You Have a Point There, that “using colons in your writing is the equivalent of playing the piano with crossed hands.” She disagrees with him, but in my view, his words can be twisted for our own use.
I retort: many piano pieces call for the right of left hand to cross over the other for a brief time. This gives the piece a higher level of difficulty, but also increases the skill required to play it and the artistic presentation produced. Thus, appropriately placed colons, and semicolons alike, display a writer’s skill to the world and place an “air” of sophistication on the sentence.
Even if you have no desire to master the English language, read this book; you will pick up a solid grasp of the basics while getting a good laugh. For the lovers of the English language, read this book; your love will grow and flourish to accent your writing with small, but hearty embellishments. Overall, the panda wins.
In a related topic, check out an article about blogging and punctuation by Jennifer Garrett titled, Eats, Blogs and Leaves .
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Leave a comment...
posted by bellevoce | 1:55 PM
5 Comments:
Every journey has road signs to direct the passage; punctuation is the road signs of writing.
I once started reading that book on a break at work. Sadly, I didn't get past the introduction.
I think pandas pretty much win at anything they try. Just in general. Props to teh r0xx0rz pandas.
Another entertaining illustration on punctuation:
Importance of the Right Punctuation
(It's a shame that while they're so particular about punctuation, the grammar of the title of the page could have been better....)
AJ
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Ahh, I understand the Frustration. But you need to understand that we live in a orld of ignorence. Personaly i read alot, and I have read enough books to knotice mistakes instantly. Depending on the author depends on how i would react. It's really a respect issue on whether your bothered by sombody useing incorrect grammer. Because you really need to ask yourself "Who used the incorrect grammer?" Then you choose how you will react. Sry to bore you with my constent typing but you asked for comments and im a big commenter so here you go.=)
I just rediscovered a cool website for grammophiles:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/index.html
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