The classic is the marvelous book title "Eats, shoots & leaves" Which is a grammar book that's delightful and funny to read. The title is about pandas, who are thus said to eat before they shoot something and depart. It's by Lynne Truss. Commas, apostrophes, and semi-colons become fun.
Rocky, actually that book's title is
Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Book (and movie/play titles) are in italics. Book chapters and poems are inside quotation marks.
What drove me nuts back when I was writing for half-a-dozen magazines, and a book every couple years, was how many different editors used different style books. Many were also stuck in the era when they went to school.
One that drove me particularly crazy was the "copy editor" for a company that published several magazines, who'd graduated from a midwestern high school, the spent a little time at a now long-defunct business school. Her main reference was an ancient collegiate dictionary which contained some variety of style manual, perhaps the Chicago version (which continues to evolves, as do many others, due to the Internet.)
A good example was a hunting article where I mentioned poring over a topographic map. She changed poring to pouring, which has a completely different meaning. After reading the magazine I e-mailed her, pointing this out--and the next time I used pored or poring she put it inside quotation marks....
John
