Section 1.5 Marks and Encodings says
"The two styles of specifying encodings can be interleaved: x='precip', alt.Y('city') is also a valid input to the encode function."
Positional arguments and keyword arguments can't be interleaved in Python. Python requires positional arguments to come before keyword arguments making encode(x='precip', alt.Y('city')) a syntax error.
Both the use of the word "interleaved" and the argument order in the example are suboptimal.
Instead of "interleaved" it could instead say something like "The two styles of encodings can be used together as long as the keyword arguments come last: alt.X('precip'), y='city' is also valid ..."