was she trying for irony?

[cellio]

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation sounds like a great book for grammar nerds, but I am put off somewhat by the 1.5 punctuation errors in the title. (One is debatable and might be excused by context (it refers to a joke containing the phrase); the other is clearly wrong.)

Comments

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Ah, right, the latter is correct in the UK, the extra comma would be marked as incorrect. And besides, its the fact that the first comma is mistakenly put into a sentence which requires neither that is the pun of the title (and a book I really must read some time).

Both forms of the adjective thing are valid, as far as I know.

Thanks for explaining!

[cellio]

Thanks for the reply!

Yup, preserving the original (incorrect) comma from the joke justifies the comma thing. Personally, I (in the US) would have punctuated the title as follows: "Eats, Shoots & Leaves": The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. And I know my high-school grammar teacher would throw a hissy fit over the placement of the colon outside the close quote (it's definitely a minority position among non-tech-writer writers); I would be willing to concede a dash (not a hyphen) to replace the colon (outside the quote!) as a gesture of cooperation. :-) But the quotes would signal clearly that the initial phrase is a quotation from elsewhere and not my text.

[cellio]

the extra comma would be marked as incorrect

Interesting. So is the following really punctuated correctly according to those who would do that marking? "jazz, rhythm and blues and Peter, Paul and Mary"

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Um, not sure. I know that items in a list must be separated by a comma unless there's an and, but your example is properly two separate things so I think it could go either way.

Having said that, despite having picked up a very keen sense of grammar over the years I didn't get much formal tuition in it, so the finer points sometimes elude me, time to reach for Fowler's English Grammar and Usage for a definitive version!