Nandakishore Varma's Reviews > Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

This joke, I think, is fairly well known: a panda after having eaten food in a restaurant, takes a gun and fires a couple of shots into the air before exiting. On being queried by the restaurant owner on his strange behaviour, the panda points to the dictionary entry on himself, which says: “eats, shoots & leaves”. The problems created by an unnecessary comma!

It is this joke that this book takes its title from – though it is not mentioned in this book. However, there are plenty of other examples, some well-known, some obscure, of how punctuation can affect a sentence and turn its meaning completely on its head. Lynne Truss does a fantastic job of putting ahead her case for punctuation; I, for one, am convinced.

‘ , ; : ! ? “ () [] {} <> – ... -

Ahem! See above the stars of this book, taking a bow; the apostrophe, the comma, the semicolon and the colon, the exclamation mark, the question mark, quotes, various types of brackets, the dash, the ellipsis and the hyphen (along with italics). The full stop, though a very important member of the contingent above, is not given special treatment because it performs a self-evident role.

Now the question you ask will be: don’t the others? Well, yes and no. It turns out that we have a fairly good grip of how most punctuation marks should be used – however, most of us (including established writers) are unaware of the nuances. Which lacuna Lynne Truss, self-declared punctuation vigilante, sets out to correct.

After some preliminary cribbing on the sins against punctuation in modern society, she starts with the apostrophe. Here, I felt on safe ground – most of the things she said jelled with me. At least I was not sinning against the apostrophe! Well, she did clear up one long-standing doubt: whether we should add it, when we are writing the plurals of abbreviations (i.e. CD’s or CDs) – apparently, both forms are correct.

When it comes to the comma, however, things get a lot murkier. It seems that there is no hard and fast rule on comma usage, though there are correct and incorrect ways of placing it. As mentioned at the beginning of the review (and through countless horror stories we have heard), an absent or misplaced comma can create havoc with the meaning of a sentence. But what exactly are its functions? The author enumerates six, and after reading them, I was feeling that they were pretty self-evident – before I admitted to myself that I had not thought about it in that way before Lynne told me. She says

...[B]etween the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a “separator” (punctuation marks are traditionally either “separators” or “terminators”) that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom. Commas, if you don’t whistle at them to calm down, are unstoppably enthusiastic at this job.

A very colourful metaphor indeed.

Now we arrive at the two pesky things: the colon, and the semicolon. I never knew exactly how to use these guys, though I had a vague idea – and I must thank Lynne for spelling it all out for me. The way I had imagined them in my mind was as breaks interrupting the vehicle of narrative: you put a comma, and you engage the clutch; the semicolon is a gentle braking; with the colon, you stop the vehicle momentarily; and the full stop brings it all to a grinding halt. It seems that my idea was not very much off: these are indeed pauses, but it seems that there are some rules for using them.

A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician’s assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.

The semicolon, in contrast, joins two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as “and” or “but”, but where a comma would be ungrammatical. It also serves as a “Special Policeman in the event of comma fights” (to see a live example, see the paragraph above the quote).

(Here, I was a bit worried about the dash – I tend to use it in lieu of the colon quite a lot – but the author set my mind at rest assuring me that it is perfectly legitimate. In fact, the dash is more “dashing”: it can subvert the meaning of the sentence in subtle ways, as shown in the example below, from Byron:

A little still she strove, and much repented,
And whispering “I’ll ne’er consent” – consented.

Lynne Truss discusses the exclamation mark, the question mark, quotation mark, ellipsis, brackets and the dash all together as these are the guys which give the text its sparkle – “cutting a dash”, to use the author’s own term. I loved the way she explained these rules as they appeared in a sort of story, where Lord Fellamar almost succeeds in spoiling Sophia’s virtue, to be frustrated at the last minute by the Squire Western.

Before winding up, I would like to mention two more things the author touches upon:

1. The use of italics. Though overkill would grate upon the reader’s nerves, apt use can enhance the power of narrative no end. In one Agatha Christie novel, the whole mystery hung upon where the emphasis in a sentence was placed: “she wasn’t there”, “she wasn’t there” or “she wasn’t there” (and this example is mine!).
2. The under-used hyphen. I could very well have written underused in the previous sentence, but I decided to take the advice of Lynne and use the cute little connector. And it is a must in some cases: a little used car is very much different from a little-used car!

So, ladies and gentlemen: punctuation is important. Though I would say that no one should lose sleep over the exact place to put that comma, or whether a colon or dash should be used, one cannot say that sometimes it does not become damn important, as the following sentence illustrates.

Woman, without her man, is nothing. (So say the MCPs.)
Woman! Without her, man is nothing. (The feminists retort.)