The slightly careless approach to punctuation

An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”) Link

This entry was written by Craig Silverman, posted on February 20, 2008 at 8:00 am, filed under Newspapers and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
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3 Comments

  1. Iain
    Posted February 20, 2008 at 2:24 pm | Permalink

    I had just come here to tell someone about this. You win again, Regret the Error.

  2. Baylink
    Posted February 20, 2008 at 6:51 pm | Permalink

    What a classic, classic place for a comma error.

    I’m sure Lynne is just chuffed at this.

  3. Shaphan
    Posted February 26, 2008 at 3:19 pm | Permalink

    If the NYT and Lynne Truss didn’t have such careless approaches to punctuation, hyphens would be linking ‘public’ and ’service’ and ‘zero’ and ‘tolerance’. They’re attributive compounds or something like that.

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