A new picture book by Lynne Truss is out. If you liked the original EATS, SHOOTS, AND LEAVES as well as the children's version with the same title about why commas matter, you'll love THE GIRL'S LIKE SPAGHETTI: WHY YOU CAN'T MANAGE WITHOUT APOSTROPHES. As with her book about commas, Truss uses each two page spread to show the huge difference an apostrophe can make. With fun illustrations, children can see the difference in meaning between sentences like "The girls like spaghetti." and "The girl's like spaghetti.". The humor in the illustrations help make the point.Another fun book and I am glad to see she is continuing with these punctuation books for children. Hopefully, more are on the way.
While I enjoyed Truss'adult book, I was not wild about the first picture book and last weekend's NYTimes review of this one made it sound very similar.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a related post about this recently. http://medinger.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/an-alternative-to-the-punctuation-police/
I saw both the article and your post, Monica, but I think I'll still get the book, not because I have any delusions that I'm actually going to teach punctuation with this book, nor because I want my students to feel bad because they still haven't mastered apostrophes. This book will just be another way to continue our conversations about the kind of work that punctuation does to help the reader.
ReplyDeleteMy kids laughed out loud when they saw the difference a comma's placement could make in Truss's first book. Hence, I'm really looking forward to laughing about grammar with my new class TWICE this year, thanks to this book.
ReplyDeleteBy no means should this be the sole source of punctuation instruction, but with upper elementary kids, turning grammar into a laughing matter can sometimes make it not so horrible (for them) to discuss and inquire about openly.