Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation has now around 700,000 copies in print since it was first published late last year. Lynne Truss is a Radio Four broadcaster and author. Her publisher acknowledges that "Some people are passionate about grammar and there are people who want to check it out if they're unsure of anything." They put the success of the book down to a renewed interest and the lively tone of the book.

However, Steven Poole at The Guardian concludes that "punctuation should be a help, not a hindrance".

Correct punctuation is not a sufficient condition for excellent writing – nor even a necessary one, as the eccentric habits of countless novelists down the years happily attest.

The book … scoots merrily through an attenuated history of other punctuation marks and their usages – commas, dashes, brackets (or lunulae) and so on. At the end Truss attempts a rousing plea for preservation of our current system of punctuation (historically contingent and always in flux though she has shown it to be) in an age of increasingly anarchic orthography, where emailers and texters flout all known rules and even turn punctuation (oh, the horror!) into smiley faces.

He continues quite aptly:

I found myself asking, for instance, whether the subtitle presents some problems. Doesn't a zero-tolerance approach to punctuation properly mean that one should not tolerate any punctuation at all?

An earlier LeafSalon mention of Eats, Shoots and Leaves explains the derivation of the rather cryptic title.

Other suggestions for those who enjoy the experience of English:

• A Concise Dictionary of English Idioms, compiled by BA Phythian
• The Oxford Guide to Style by RM Ritter
• The New Fowler's Modern English Usage by RW Burchfield
• The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage by Kingsley Amis
• The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying, & Quotation, edited by Elizabeth Knowles
• Le Mot Juste: The Penguin Dictionary of Foreign Terms and Phrases, edited by Eugene Ehrlich
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and EB White
• English Our English (and How to Sing It) by Keith Waterhouse
• Mother Tongue: The English Language by Bill Bryson
• Oxford Dictionary of English (second edition)