“You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion – and arguably you didn’t have much of that to begin with.”” “This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset about it. If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. Can you really master punctuation and mechanics? Of course, you can! It is just a matter of knowing the rules the guide provides.“In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss dares to say that, with our system of punctuation patently endangered, it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them for the wonderful and necessary things they are. The second appendix helps students avoid the most common mistakes when spelling English words.

The first of them is a compact reference guide aiming to assist learners in understanding the corrections made by the instructor. Finally, the book is followed by the appendices. The third part of the book aims at helping students prepare their paper for submission to the instructor as well as organize their article and acknowledge reference sources in their contribution, in case it is submitted for publication in Europe or the U.S.A. You need to follow the conventions so that your writing will look the way formal writing is expected to look. The second part of the guide is dedicated to mechanics – conventional rules such as the one requiring capitalization of the first word of a sentence or writing titles of books and films. Besides learning how to use punctuation correctly, you will see how punctuation can give you the freedom to write new kinds of sentences and express ideas in more effective ways. If you study the examples carefully, you will gain understanding of how to use each punctuation mark in your own writing. By giving sentences from prominent writers and well-known personalities for both examples and exercises, we hope to show the full range of possibilities for punctuation in contemporary writing as well as expand your background knowledge, which is crucial for non-native speakers of the language. The first part of it illustrates the uses of punctuation marks. All this gives support to the idea that to assume a certain standard of professional communication, one must organize his or her writing clearly, making it look professional. When we apply for a position, the first impression on the potential employer is made by our CV, not by the way we talk or behave. We send emails, SMS’s, join blogs, forums and chat-rooms on the Internet. In the twenty-first century, we write much more than our parents did in the twentieth. This guide is designed as a practical resource.

Author of eats shoots and leaves