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Book: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Quotes of Book: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The
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  1. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
    book-quotepunctuation

  2. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    The rule is: the word 'it's' {with apostrophe} stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
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  3. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost {2003}, Hilary Mantel reveals: "I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there's no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.
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  4. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    We read privately, mentally listening to the writer's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding. Holding the book, we are aware of posterity and continuity. Knowing that the printed word is always edited, typeset and proof-read before it reaches us, we appreciate its literary authority. Having paid money for it {often}, we have a sense of investment and a pride of ownership, not to mention a feeling of general virtue.
    book-quotereading

  5. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    There is even a rather delightful publication for children called "The Punctuation Repair Kit", which takes the line "Hey! It's uncool to be stupid!" - which is a lie, of course, but you have to admire them for trying.
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  6. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's.
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  7. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    In Beachcomber's hilarious columns about the Apostropher Royal in The Express, a certain perversely comforting law is often reiterated: the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: "For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its." Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall.
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  8. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    That's why they came up with the emoticon, too-the emoticon being the greatest {or most desperate, depending how you look at it} advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.
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  9. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price.
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  10. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons
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  11. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    The rule is: the word "it's" {with apostrophe} stands for "it is" or "it has". If the word does not stand for "it is" or "it has" then what you require is "its". This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
    book-quote

  12. Lynne Truss _ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The

    nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste.
    book-quote
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