Eats MORE, Shoots & Leaves

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.)

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.

Schnell geliefert - witzig und gleichzeitig informativ (wenn nicht sogar lehrreich).

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

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.