Interview with Lynne Truss 1

This is an interview by John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, with Lynne Truss, the author of ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves – The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation!’

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a book which is both informative and amusing. The title is a joke, about an irate panda who walks into a café, orders a sandwich, eats it, draws a gun and fires two shots into the air and then walks out of the café. The waiter finds the explanation for this erratic behaviour in a badly punctuated wildlife manual which the bear leaves behind: "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Why is this is a mistake*?

Why is the phrase ‘The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’ slightly amusing?⁺

This interview is not conducted in a serious but in a jocular way. Watch out for some of the funny comments which are not to be taken too seriously! There are people in the audience who are giggling and laughing most of the time because of this.

*The correct punctuation is ‘A panda eats shoots and leaves’. The wrong placing of the comma after the verb eats turns the plural nouns ‘shoots‘ and ‘leaves‘ into two verbs – to shoot and to leave, changing the meaning completely!

⁺ Because it is a phrase usually used for serious crimes, not for matters such as punctuation.

Please click here for the questions on the interview.