Eats, Shoots and Leaves: A Book Editors Can Love

Want to know how an editor thinks and spends most of his/her working (and often non-working) time? Then read Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, and learn more about punctuation in the process. Delightfully written, she explains the proper way to use punctuation and the differences between American and British punctuation. I am a longtime magazine writer/editor, but late in the game reading the book, only doing so last week. I was on a cruise, found the book in the library, and curled up in a chair, and read the whole thing in one sitting. I was in my element for sure. She talks about editors "falling into a comma," "having commaphilia," and how seasoned editors can argue for hours about the placement of a comma. Sound dreadful? Maybe to you, but to me, I was in editor heaven reading the book. Long live the semicolon!