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

[amergina.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly from talking to Karen, The Associated Press uses the X, Y & Z form of commas. All the papers she ever worked at followed the AP guidelines. I prefer the X, Y, & Z form and use it in my documentation. As long as the usage is consistent, it's fine. :)

[cellio]

Consistency is important, yes (and harder to achieve on multi-writer projects such as newspapers). I'm glad that in the field of technical writing there's generally more tolerance of precision in writing. :-) (Sadly, one previous employer insisted on certain grammatical points that made the resulting documentation incorrect -- or, if you tried to work around that, clunky. This is what happens when you give people management positions based on politics rather than on merit.)