A moment's hesitation... Yes, a full stop here—but shouldn't there be a comma there? Or would a hyphen be better? Punctuation can be a nuisance; it is often simply neglected. Wrong! The most recent ...

When reading a classic book, we tend to pay attention to the themes, the characters, and the story. We say the words aloud. We notice everything, in fact, except for one crucial thing: the punctuation ...

Poor punctuation: all rules and no play. Countless style guides over the ages have prescribed the exacting rules for where to put your em-dashes, your en-dashes, your commas, your Oxford commas, your ...

There is a punctuation mark that Emily Dickinson used obsessively, that Mary Shelley deployed with abandon, that David Foster Wallace built an entire prose architecture around, and that James Baldwin ...

In elementary school, we learn that there are logical rules for the use of punctuation. Semicolons connect two related independent clauses, while colons follow an independent clause and introduce a ...

“People don’t know why they get so upset about language,” David Crystal told me recently, over Skype from his home in Wales. “ ‘Potato’s,’ with an apostrophe ‘S,’ ” he offered, as an example of the ...