Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference by Lynne Truss, Illustrations by Bonnie Timmons, is published in hardback by Profile, priced £8.99. Available now.
The world went a bit potty, in a nice way, for Lynne Truss's book Eats, Shoots & Leaves in 2004.
Suddenly, a lot of adults who hadn't paid a lot of attention to their commas were using them with great pride. Many were still getting their apostrop
hes wrong, but the commas - they were working out just fine.
It seems only fitting now, when our children are being subjected to stricter rules on nutrition and exercise from an even earlier age, that we tackle them with a healthy dose of grammar before the shoddy habits creep in.
Lynne Truss's children's version of her punctuation prescription is just as humour-filled as the earlier work.
Concentrating on commas, it takes a simple sentence and shows how vastly different it can be with a little comma.
"Look at that huge hot dog" (that's a big cooked sausage) and "Look at that huge, hot dog" (that's a Great Dane in need of a drink.). Perhaps it could be argued that the meaning would be clear in context, but asking children to use context is often one of the most frustrating parts of parenthood!
What makes this book so engaging is the artwork by Bonnie Timmons. Her cartoons are simple and colourful, but provide the vital example of why the comma would make a difference.
Each sentence has a picture accompaniment and these show the changes in a crystal clear manner. They're also full of the sort of images that young children can relate to: giant dogs, twisty-turny slides, a girl walking on her head…
At the back of the book the pairs of pictures are recreated with the reasons why the comma made such a difference. This gives an easy introduction to grammatical innards such as modifiers, dependent clauses and the differences between objects, nouns and verbs.
Some of the sentence examples are a little archaic in today's speech, but this is easily overlooked when the artwork is so strong. Children might not use these examples in their writing, but if it makes them pause and consider that they might need some punctuation, then Ms Truss has done a very worthy thing.
Anyone looking for a birthday or Christmas present that does more than just entertain an under-10 should look no further than this book.
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