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The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. The title of the book is a syntactic ambiguity‍-‌a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous or erroneous grammatical construction‍-‌and derived from a joke (a variant on a " bar joke") about bad punctuation, here from the back cover of the book:Ī panda walks into a café. Contrary to usual publishing practice, the US edition of the book left the original British conventions intact. In 2004, the US edition became a New York Times best-seller. In keeping with the general lighthearted tone of the book, he praises Truss for bringing life back into the art of punctuation, adding, "If Lynne Truss were Roman Catholic I'd nominate her for sainthood." Irish American author Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, wrote the foreword to the US edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In the book's final chapter, she opines on the importance of maintaining punctuation rules and addresses the damaging effects of email and the Internet on punctuation.

Truss touches on varied aspects of the history of punctuation and includes many anecdotes, which add another dimension to her explanations of grammar. There is one chapter each on apostrophes commas semicolons and colons exclamation marks, question marks and quotation marks italic type, dashes, brackets, ellipses and emoticons and hyphens. 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": she added this dedication as an afterthought after remembering the factoid when reading one of her radio plays.

Truss dedicates the book "to the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Her goal is to remind readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language by mixing humour and instruction. In the book, published in 2003, Truss bemoans the state of punctuation in the United Kingdom and the United States and describes how rules are being relaxed in today's society. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is a non-fiction book written by Lynne Truss, the former host of BBC Radio 4's Cutting a Dash programme.