Can You Eat, Shoot and Leave? by Clare Dignall

Can You Eat, Shoot and Leave by Clare Dignall is 'the only official workbook' for the international bestseller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss.

The idea of a workbook to support Eats, Shoots and Leaves is an excellent one; the best way to learn, I have always found, is to do. The workbook follows the pattern of topics of the original: The Apostrophes; The Comma; The Colon and Semicolon; The Dash, The Question Mark and Exclamation Mark; and The Hyphen. Lynne Truss has written an entertaining foreword, and this is followed by a 'Cosmo-style' quiz to ascertain the reader's skill level.

There then follows the 'meat' of the book - the chapters on punctuation. Within each chapter is a short introduction, including the history of the punctuation under discussion; a warm-up exercise; further explanations with examples; and then another couple of exercises. I found that I learnt a lot, and it answered several punctuation problems that had confused me for some time. The sections on semicolons and colons were particularly clear, and I also thought the section on direct speech was well done.

The penultimate chapter is called 'The Challenge'. This contains longer pieces to edit, and they are, indeed, quite challenging. The book ends with another quiz: excellent for finding out if the book has had any beneficial effect!

I worked through the book immediately after reading Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which I suspect is how many readers will come to it. Lynne Truss's humour is a hard act to follow, and Clare Dignall's seemed a little laboured to me in comparison. Humour is very much a matter of taste, however, and what may not appeal to this reader may have the opposite effect on another.

Some of the examples, for instance in the section on apostrophes, were idiosyncratically chosen, and depended on the reader's knowing the names of various colleges in Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which seemed a little too needlessly specialised. There were also a few grammatical mistakes - somewhat ironic in a book like this - and future editions could do with more stringent copy-editing. However, despite these quibbles, I found it a useful book which has influenced my sentence structure, and I intend to keep it in the top drawer of my desk for ease of reference.

This book was sent to me for review by the publisher.