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

Lynne Truss pulls off the impressive feat of pumping about 20 pages of expository writing full of enough hot air to go into orbit (or at least top the Bestsellers list for several weeks).

I could probably write a book of equal length (a fluffy and yet tedious 204 pages) going into what a disorganized mess this book is, but I'll spare you. Instead, here are three reasons why you should save yourself the criminal $17.50 this book costs.

First, Truss comes across as such a pretentious, self-important jerk that it makes the reading often unbearable. Take this little nugget from page 104:

"To this day I am ashamed of what I did [her response to a pen-pal, both in eighth grade:] to Kerry-Anne (who unsurprisingly never wrote back). I replied to her childish letter on grown-up deckled green paper with a fountain pen. Whether I actually donned a velvet smoking jacket for the occasion I can't remember, but I know I deliberately dropped the word "desultory", and I think I may have used some French. Pretentious? Well, to adapt Gustave Flaubert's famous identification with Emma Bovary, "Adrian Mole, age de treize ans et trois quarts... c'est moi."

I don't speak French, and she leaves this line, pretentiously, untranslated, so I'll have to give her the benefit of the doubt. However, she does not seemed to have learned much from this unrepentantly asshole experience (note: she goes on to use poor Kerry-Anne four more times for her examples) because she spends the entire book essentially trying to tell the world what to do. You might wonder to what end. High standards? A love of literature? No, just her own need to sound sophisticated and manage other people's business. She attempts to gloss this over with an ill-fated attempt at humor, which I'll address next.

Second, she is just not funny. I generally love British humor and I'm familiar with a fair amount of British comedy movies, shows, and writing. I think she must have produced the least funny attempt at humor in British publication in the last 100 years. Her jokes are based on a shared sentiment of self importance, not joy of the language. Furthermore, she tries to come across as appealing to everyone and treating her targets with cautious respect, but she ends up just taking cheap shots at greengrocers, teenagers, and the illiterate (fear of losing language to the barbarians). That's the sickening part. Couple that with her tedious recurrent references to her being single at at age 48 (at time of press), her lack of stereotypical teenage fun ("when other girls of my age were attending the Isle of Wight Festival and having abortions, I bought a copy of Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage"), and her repeat references to the same stale jokes (Sir Roger Casement "hanged on a comma") and you get a long, tiring read. Her style is an attempt at tongue in cheek, but she really just can't pull it off.

Finally, the book does not even achieve what it aims to. That's impressive for a book pumped ten times the size of its meaningful contents. Truss's real issue seems to be dissatisfaction with lowered standards by the public. She lumps improper punctuation in with poor grammar and phonetic spelling, and in the process she looses sight of her original aim. Poor writing, she assumes, is due to primarily to ignorance; she deplores shorthand writing for text messages, but fails to consider the utility in that context (she doesn't criticize court stenographers using official shorthand). Furthermore, she seems to interpret lax writing as a sign of social, and perhaps moral, decay rather than personal standards for what matters. These days everyone accepts, at least I believe, that the internet is filled with lazy, disorganized writing. I hold most all my own writing to high standards, including this book review, because it matters to me. I don't think it makes much sense or does much good to blow off steam about the masses' lazy writing on the internet. There's no clear thesis and no clear argument. That's the death call for expository writing and defeats the entire purpose of writing the book. The book fails as an educational tool and cannot be redeemed on its humor or otherwise.

I've always had high standards with writing (grammar, punctuation, spelling, style), but having high standards is different from being anal. Truss would have benefited from revisiting The Elements of Style (to which she pays a passing nod at the end) and thoroughly edited her book on everything besides the punctuation, especially the organization. Clarity, flow, and interest would go a long way.