The punctuation mark that annoys people the most is, without a doubt, the apostrophe. Whole books have been written lamenting atrocities like “five carrot’s and three kiwi’s” (for the record, that ...

I’ve gotten a lot of emails recently about where to put periods and commas relative to quotation marks. The notes were prompted by a recent column in which I mentioned that, in American English, a ...

Everyone knows that the world’s material resources — food, water, oil — are distributed unequally, but few realize that the same is true for punctuation. Take quotation marks: Some forms of writing, ...

Punctuation is a set of specific marks or symbols that we used to express the meaning of our sentences clearly and to make the flow of the text smooth. It shows us where we need to pause, it separates ...

Notice anything wrong with those quotation marks, shown during NBC's broadcast of the Winter Olympics? They're wrong in a really bizarre way, so wrong that they offend columnist John Kelly. (John ...

A colon should follow ‘IE,’ and commas would come in handy after ‘exposed’ and ‘change.’ ‘You’re’ is a contraction that means ‘you are;’ ‘your’ is the possessive form of ‘you.’ If we use our noodles, ...

I do not know who first observed the difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma,” with a comma, and “Let’s eat Grandma,” without. One version expresses a relatively polite invitation to dinner; the other ...