ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Eats, Shoots & Leaves

How long does it take to read Eats, Shoots & Leaves?

The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Lynne Truss

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss takes about 3 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 3 hours 50 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2003. 209 pages, about 57,475 words.

8 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 6 hours 23 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 3 hours 50 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 24 minutes

The page count is the median across 13 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Anxious about the apostrophe? Confused by the comma? Stumped by the semicolon? Join Lynne Truss on a hilarious tour through the rules of punctuation that is sure to sort the dashes from the hyphens. We all had the basic rules of punctuation drilled into us at school, but punctuation pedants have good reason to suspect they never sank in. ‘Its Summer!’ screams a sign that sets our teeth on edge. ‘Pansy’s ready’, we learn to our considerable interest (‘Is she?’) as we browse among the bedding plants. It is not only the rules of punctuation that have come under attack but also a sense of why they matter. In this runaway bestseller, Lynne Truss takes the fight to emoticons and greengrocers’ apostrophes with a war cry of ‘Sticklers unite!’

Subjects: Non-Fiction, reference, punctuation, syntactic ambiguities, Humor, hyphens

More by Lynne Truss

Books like this

Popular books of similar length