Quote:
Originally Posted by Ripplinger
As particular as I am about having punctuation (and spelling) correct, I actually prefer it if publishers would leave books alone as originally written either in the UK or US and not do a different book. I can adapt to the UK's punctuation and spelling, that doesn't bother me at all, I realize it will be different and I actually enjoy knowing the differences.
But what I find even more annoying is when they also insist on giving the book a different title between the US and UK, so you think there's 2 books by a favorite author you waste time hunting down, only to find out they're one and the same. That just drives me nuts :P. The differences aren't that great that we won't understand the books from the other side of the pond or even choose not to buy them because they aren't published for US or UK.
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I think one way to deal with the issue is to include a short explanation of the use punctuation at the beginning of the book. That way, the reader will have an indication of what the author intended and it can also avoid confusion when using non-standard punctuation.
As an example, in stories I've written I've used [ and ] to surround text that indicates a character's thoughts, using them just like quote marks for text spoken by a character. At the beginning of the story I included a short statement indicating what [ and ] means, and also what other formatting/punctuation choices mean (such as Courier New for text that appears on a screen within the story).