 What’s the deal with the black & white saddle shoes?  Click here for the story of our farm in Greene County, Iowa. Here's looking at life at Simple Serenity Farm  Carla’s sister & brother-in-law Chris and Tony Woods, of Des Moines, were at the farm on Sunday, August 22, helping Carla do the lawn mowing and other yard work that we’ve struggled to keep up with lately, with all our medical appointments. The Woodses brought along their 18-month-old granddaughter Ari, who was a delight watching all the action from the porch with Chuck, catching up on her reading and then getting a moment on the lawn tractor seat! Click here for larger format Earlier photos in this series Iowa Hall of Pride netINS, Inc. Butler House on Grand B&B Sam's Barber Shop Douglas T. Bates III, Attorney KMA Radio's ''Chuck & Don Show'' Barack Obama story & coloring book The Monks of New Melleray Abbey RELATED LINKS About Offenburger.com Biographies Want to Reprint? Want Updates? ARCHIVES Chuck Offenburger's columns Christie Vilsack's columns Carla Offenburger's columns Carla's book reviews Jared Strong's columns Guest Columns The Simple Serenity Farm columns Farm Photos, 2006 - 2008 Our Iowa News Digest Along Our Way 
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What's Carla Reading?
“Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” by Lynne Truss (2004) When I purchased this British best-seller by journalist Lynne Truss, I had high expectations. I was holding it to a very high standard, since I have read, taught and liked Patricia O’Conner’s books. O’Conner, a native Iowan, is a former New York Times copy editor, humorist and language expert. She is the author of “Woe is I,” “Words Fail Me” and “You Send Me.” I’ve read and used her work in many of my written communication classrooms. Most often, I’ve used all of “Words Fail Me” in my classroom to get young college students loosened up about their own writing skills and failures. Starting the students into that book at the beginning of a semester sets a fun tone for dealing with the serious topics of grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and more. O’Conner is very funny when she writes about writing. For example, she describes “Woe is I” as “a survival guide for intelligent people who probably never have diagrammed a sentence and never will. Most of us don’t know a gerund from a gerbil and don’t care, but we’d like to speak and write as though we did.” She helps students have a little fun as they discover their own writing faults and strengths. I’ve read “Words Fail Me” at least seven times, and every time I read it I find more to remember and know about my own writing, and the writing of others. So even though Truss’ new book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” has taken the literary world by storm, I was questioning just how good it could be. As the jacket cover states: “The book became a runaway success in the UK, hitting number one on the bestseller lists…With more than 500,000 copies of her book in print in her native England, Lynne Truss is ready to rally the troops on this side of the pond with her rousing cry, ‘Sticklers unite!’ ” Such success took even Truss by surprise. She certainly gives it her best effort and the book is fun to read, especially if you are an English nerd like me who likes to read about writing. But the truth is, she doesn’t come close to what I think O’Conner does, especially for use in an American classroom. That’s not to discredit what Truss does do. The book is just British. At times I knew she was being clever, but I couldn’t appreciate the humor. And the British use language differently than Americans do. They have different grammar and punctuation rules, which makes things difficult to appreciate. It certainly would be tough for most students, who would be confused with such things as Truss’ using the term “ full stop” for our American period, or her “inverted commas” for single quote marks. In fact, the differences in rules for how to use punctuation inside or outside quotation marks would send students scrambling to take a Physics class. Truss writes, “There is, too, a gulf between American usage and our own, with Americans always using double quotation marks and American grammarians insisting that, if a sentence ends with a phrase in inverted commas, all the terminal punctuation for the sentence must come tidily inside the speech marks, even when this doesn’t seem to make sense.” Since this is one of the biggest problems I found in the writing classroom – and one I often find in things I read – I can’t imagine confusing students more by giving them a book filled with the British way, which is the wrong way according to us Americans. But, Truss doesn’t claim her book is for classroom use, and that’s what makes it worth reading. She provides some extensive history on punctuation. For example, she gives the history of the exclamation point by going back to the mid 17th century, when it was defined in the 1680 book “Treatise of Stops, Points or Pauses, and of Notes which are used in Writing and Print.” But her own description of it is much more humorous. She writes, “In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practices the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.” Her own history on how she became a stickler for punctuation is worth noting. She claims, “While other girls were out with boyfriends on Sunday afternoon getting their necks disfigured by love bites, I was at home with the wireless, listening to an Ian Messiter quiz called ‘Many a Slip,’ in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in pieces of prose.” Truss clarifies exactly what “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” is and is not. It “is not a book about grammar,” she writes. “I am not a grammarian. To me a subordinate clause will forever be (since I heard the actor Martin Jarvis describe it thus) one of Santa’s little helpers. A degree in English is not a prerequisite for caring about where a bracket is preferred to a dash, or a comma needs to be replaced by a semicolon.” She explains what the book does do when she writes, “This one gives you permission to love punctuation. It’s about how we got the punctuation we have today; how such a tiny but adaptable system of marks allows us to notate most (but not all) types of verbal expression…” One of her reasons for writing this book comes from what she calls a “tragic historical coincidence.” We are living in “a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy,'' which ''has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don’t know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll.” Truss doesn’t stop with just poking fun at the new world of illiterate global communicators with her harsh words. She strikes at those with PhDs, too. In perhaps her funniest and most harsh words, she writes about the confusion over using “its” and “it’s.” The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands for “it is” or “it has”. If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has” then what you require is “its”. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. Truss goes on to cover all the basics in regard to punctuation as she writes about the apostrophe, the comma, the colon, the semicolon, quotation marks, the exclamation point, the dash and more. She writes, “No wonder feelings run high about the comma. When it comes to improving the clarity of a sentence, you can nearly always argue that one should go in; you can nearly always argue that one should come out.” The ultimate message Truss gives her reader is serious. She writes, “We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and allusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.” We can’t argue with that, can we? The book is an easy read – especially if you appreciate a good book on punctuation – and once we Americans overcome the American/British differences, it is a book filled with lessons that, for the most part, can be applied on both “sides of the pond.” And of course, the title is intriguing on its own. But I’ll let you discover why a book on punctuation would be called “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” It might be reason enough to pick up the book. – Carla Offenburger Now reading“Seasons of Grace: Wisdom from the Cloister,” by Mother Gail Fitzpatrick (2000). Most recently read and reviewed “The Great Iowa Touring Book,” by Mike Whye (2004). This well-known journalist from Council Bluffs has produced what should be in everybody’s car as they travel the state this summer, or plan vacations. The book offers 27 excellent self-guided tours that are so good that we might start using some of them for our Offenburger.com Tours! “Be Intolerant: Because Some Things Are Just Stupid,” by Ryan Dobson with Jefferson Scott (2003). Guest reviewer Shelli Smith, one of Carla’s students at Buena Vista University, says this book makes you think about whose values and whose definitions of tolerance and stupidity you’re going to embrace. “You Don’t Have to be Rich,” by Jean Chatzky (2003). I like books about financial planning – especially if I find that I already do some of what is recommended! But if I can also pick up a few new good tips, ones that I can set as new goals, I like the book even better. And I like this one a lot. “Five Thousand Days Like This One,” by Jane Brox (1999). At times I felt like this book was going to take me five thousand days to finish, at others, it was going to take less than five thousand seconds! It is a wonderful story of an author’s exploration of her family’s history in America. “The Last Juror,” by John Grisham (2004). When Carla’s 28-year-old nephew Tim Walsh asked here, “When are you going to read something I’d enjoy?” she had a hunch young guys might like this novel. She’d read only one Grisham book previously, and it was one in which he’d abandoned his characteristic style. “The Last Juror” turned out to be a fascinating tale that young men – and almost anybody else – would like, and our reviewer came away convinced that Grisham is a masterful storyteller. Comments from you readers Mike Whye, of Council Bluffs, whose “The Great Iowa Touring Book” was reviewed favorably here last week, in a note to Shawna Lode, who does media relations for the Iowa Tourism Office in Des Moines: “Hi, Shawna. I got quite a plug from the Offenburgers. Hope it helps sell Iowa as well. …’til later, Mike.” Lode’s response, which she copied me with: “Hi, Mike. What a great review. You must think Carla’s wonderful. I do, too! She’s a long-time friend and one my three female mentors. I don’t tell her this enough, however. I must pick up a copy of your book for myself. I’m only hearing great things about it. Shawna.” Whye’s handwritten note to me, received in the mail this week: “Thank you for the very kind book review! Coming from one who has also traveled Iowa a lot, your words mean a lot. Being that you’re in Jefferson now, you might do a piece on Alice Nipps, sculptor. She set up Alpha Studio/Gallery on the north end of town.” It just so happens Chuck and I visited Alpha Studio/Gallery and met Alice during Jefferson’s Bell Tower Festival our first weekend in town. I loved her building. It could become Jefferson’s own hip little concert hall and gathering spot. Send your book comments to carla@Offenburger.com
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