A misplaced comma in the list of ingredients gives diners aYeah, sure, commas. You've gotta have 'em. But, please. Notice there are two versions of Truss's bestseller, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" - one for them, one for us.
totally different dish -- and gives British writer Lynne Truss
new ammunition in her campaign for the proper use of
punctuation
Speaking of which - "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," that is - the ampersand makes things dicey but I once got into a knock-down, drag-out over whether one uses a comma before the "and" in a series - should it be "red, white and blue" or "red, white, and blue"? Determined to get to the bottom of the matter I consulted seven style books, including Strunk & White, the University of Chicago style manual, The AP's style book, my old college textbook, and a couple of others, I've forgotten what they were. Three books said use the comma, three said don't, and the seventh, the college textbook, said whatever turns you on.
I liked the AP style book myself but it said no. I was in the pro-comma camp myself, so I changed the style book. I later mentioned that to a friend of mine who was an editor for the Chicago Tribune and he said yeah, the Trib had a guy who sat there all day putting commas back into AP stories because the Trib's style book said use them.
I'm pretty ambivalent about commas myself, these days. In a previous life I wrote speeches and used commas liberally - even sometimes where they didn't belong - to indicate phrasing for the speaker. I've been trying to taper off. As a result I'm more or less back in the whatever-turns-you-on school. Except when it comes to "red, white, and blue," in which case I'm definitely a comma, guy.
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