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

[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.