Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Lynne Truss
In order to sell Eats, Shoots & Leaves to a wider audience than grammar sticklers and English students, Truss (or rather, her publisher, Gotham Books) designed its cover to appeal to the common consumer who may not necessarily care about grammar. The illustration on the front cover appeals to ethos in two ways. First, the potential reader sees pandas, which make any object infinitely cuter. He or she then realizes that one of the pandas is holding a gun, which shocks him or her enough that "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" does not effect as much terror or disgust as it typically would. The front also appeals to ethos using the advertisement, "The Runaway #1 British Bestseller," with #1 large and bright red. Such a possible book must be accurate and entertaining, or so the logic argues. The back cover appeals to both ethos and logos by citing positive reviews from respected and varied sources. Again, if this many people loved the book this deeply, then so will the common reader. The short explanation of the title is a humorous misunderstanding that implies that the book will be equally amusing. The story finishes with the sentence, "So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally life or death." This conveys the book's purpose of teaching the importance of punctuation without alarming the reader with textbook-style writing.
In my opinion, Gotham Books designed or at least chose the cover well. It downplays punctuation enough that it doesn't look boring, although it is still the obvious topic of the book. It was a bestseller, so something must have been done correctly (and it probably wasn't just the content, unless British people care about grammar a lot more than Americans). Gotham actually managed to make a book about punctuation popular.
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