When I think of punctuation, I think of Andy from Parks and Rec when he says, "I don't know who Al Gore is, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask." Perhaps we could amend Andy's remark to be, "I don't know what a semicolon is, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask."

Thankfully, Lynne Truss is here to enlighten us with her New York Times Bestseller: Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Often punctuation is regarded as a dry subject, a subject that we begrudgingly participate in. Lynne Truss makes punctuation fascinating and humorous. She enlightens us with punctuation history and usage, whilst entertaining us with punctuation blunders and jokes. 

Join me as we read and discuss Eats, Shoots & Leaves together as a class. Let's ask our punctuation questions that we've been too afraid to ask! Let's find our answers together! What could be cooler than a Punctuation Book Club, right?

Every class we will discuss a chapter (or two) from Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Learners must have their own copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves to read and refer to. We will go over the general rules about the correlating punctuation from the assigned chapter. We will ask our questions and prepare for a daily quiz and/or game regarding the punctuation that we've covered.

The class schedule will be as follows:

Class 1
Introduction to class. Discuss "Preface" and "Introduction –The Seventh Sense".

Class 2
Discuss "The Tractable Apostrophe". Quiz/game regarding apostrophe rules. 

Class 3
Discuss "That'll Do, Comma". Quiz/game regarding comma rules.

Class 4
Discuss "Airs and Graces". Quiz/game regarding colons and semicolons.

Class 5
Discuss "Cutting a Dash". Quiz/game regarding exclamation points, question marks, italics, quotation marks, dashes, brackets, parenthesis, and ellipsis.

Class 6
Discuss "A Little Used Punctuation Mark" and "Merely Conventional Signs". Discuss the use of hyphens. Final review and quiz/game.


At the end of class, learners will finish reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves. With our reading and class discussions, Learners will be better able to create comprehensible sentences with their punctuation arsenal.