A master class in style and punctuation

The New Yorker's Mary Norris led a fascinating discussion in the use of punctuation on either side of the pond. Together with my friend and fellow writer Carole Seawert, I was part of the audience at a select gathering at the Vogue academy in Soho.

    Carole's alter-ego is The Apostrophe Woman (left, with her apostrophe on a stick) and she knows her stuff when it comes to punctuation. Nevertheless, we both found Norris's presentation interesting.

    Just as there are differences between UK and US spelling (largely, according to Norris, as an act of rebellion led by Noah Webster), so there are differences in punctuation. There was much debate on the use of single and double speech marks: ' vs ". Similarly on the use of single and double dashes: - and --.

    Of course, it's all not helped, as Norris pointed out, by the fact that The New Yorker would say "red, white, and blue" while the New York Times prefers "red, white and blue". Oh, the joys of the Oxford comma!

    Who even knew that hyphenation and word breaks could be so different. The US version would be En-gland and En-glish, whereas the UK would always use Eng-land and Eng-lish.

    I particularly liked a rule that Norris reproduced:

    Muphry's law: If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.