An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces

From The New Yorker, Louis Menand takes apart Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

More importantly, he goes on to talk about writing and the writer’s “voice.”