Conservation of Apostrophes

When I started this blog, I promised to write about some of the books I have read earlier this year. I have been very delinquent in doing so, so here is an effort to catch up:

"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss is manna for punctuation nazis like me. (The book's fantastic subtitle is "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.") If you are like me and shudder whenever you see a sentence like "The dog barked it's head off," you should read this book. The much-misunderstood apostrophe gets the most treatment, since evidence suggests that most people were asleep during the apostrophe lesson in their 5th-grade grammar class. My favorite tidbit from this book is Truss' "Law of Conservation of Apostrophes," which states that "For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its. Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our head against a wall."

Aficionados of other punctuation marks should not fear—the comma, dash, semicolon and other marks all get their fair share of attention too. The book even comes with a handy set of comma, apostrophe and period shaped stickers, so you can go around fixing other people's punctation mistakes. (Don't worry, I haven't actually used any of them.)