Eats MORE, Shoots & Leaves: Why, ALL Punctuation Marks Matter!

My students and I have really enjoyed this book. I use it to have my students create their own pictures depicting what the sentences mean. I bought the first version of this book (green cover), and they really overlap each other. If I had known, I would've only purchased one of the books and not both.

As a former English teacher, I love this book. It's simple but accurate!

Having enjoyed the adult book Eats, Shoots and Leaves years ago, I knew I would love Lynne Truss’ book Eats MORE, Shoots & Leaves: Why, ALL Punctuation Marks Matter! It is written and illustrated appropriately for children but could also be helpful for teenagers and adults who just don’t understand that a few tiny punctuation marks can change the whole meaning of a sentence. Bonnie Timmons’ drawings are hysterically funny and illustrate so well the concepts.The pages are set up so the differences in meaning are clear. On one page, for example, the words are “Eat here, and get gas.” The illustration shows cars getting gas at a place that also sells food. On the facing page, the reader is admonished: “Eat here and get gas.” with the illustration depicting a restaurant where a patron flies through the air with a tremendous burp. (Now what grade school boy is not going to laugh at that?) Under each picture, upside down, is an adult explanation of the effect of punctuation or lack of it. The inserted punctuation is always clearly indicated in red. This book is a winner. It achieves its purpose of explaining why punctuation is so important. Who knew grammar could be so funny?I would like to extend my thanks to Edelweiss and to G.P. Putnam for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

My nine-year-old grandson read this as soon as it arrived and loved it!

This children’s book shows kids what can go awry for want of properly placed punctuation. Lynne Truss’s popular and humorous grammar guide has spun off a cottage industry of books designed to shift perception of grammar studies from brutally dull to witty and fun.The book is simple and easy to use. Throughout most of the book, each page consists of two pictures, each captioned with a sentence that describes said picture. The captioning sentences consist of the same words in the same order, but differently punctuated. Often, one of the plates is punctuated to make a perfectly logical picture; whereas, the other is absurd. However, other times both meanings are reasonable, but substantially different. Some of the sentences are grammatical oldies but goodies (e.g. “Eat here and get gas.”) but most are more original. There are a few pages upon which a larger multi-part picture is drawn with three or four captions.The book’s only other feature is a sentence that explains the difference between the captions. Said sentence is written upside-down in small print below each plate, and is presumably a cheat code for parents who haven’t brushed up on “Strunk & White” in a while. Besides missing Oxford commas (i.e. the titular problem,) the book demonstrates miscommunications based on missing or misplaced apostrophes, semi-colons, parentheses, and exclamation marks.The only surprise was finding “dog’s” used as a contraction for “dog is.” I was under the impression that that apostrophization could only be a possessive (i.e. “dog’s bone” is a bone that belongs to a dog) and only specified pronouns got apostrophe-“s” as a contraction. Don’t get me wrong, I employ such contractions all the time in poetry -- mostly to preserve meter -- but poets love to infuriate grammarians.Though it’s intended for kids, I enjoyed reading this book, and found it to be a nice review of punctuation that didn’t require getting too cerebral. I’d recommend it for parents, and for those who want to hit the highlights of punctuation in less than a half an hour (it’s only about 30 pages.)

Kind of inappropriate and not helpful. It has no application just examples w the story and the stories were bizarre and weird for little children. I don’t recommend itHomeschooling mom of 5 here.

Too many repeats from the other books. I purchased three different titles thinking that they would provide lots of examples to use with my students, but among the 3 books, most of it overlaps at least once, sometimes even more than that.

Pretty boring.....

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