Lovely article on the importance – and limitations – of following punctuation rules from The Guardian.
One of the areas I’ve been battling with has been the fact I was born and live in the UK but write with an American audience in mind. I am steeped in the tradition of UK English and have been teaching myself the grammar of US English. Not only are there different rules for where to place commas etc but the phrasing itself is different.
English is a complicated language – like so many others apart from Esperanto – and there is more than one version of it. And I have been working on my novels for several years now, all but one of which I hope has an American accent – but not an entirely US spelling. The reason? While I have my eye on an American audience, I also have an eye on a British audience. Good job I have two eyes.