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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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, ...

Punctuation marks are the unsung heroes of writing. Everybody uses them and whenever they do not it looks weird to see a sentence run on so long without any breaks. Scientist and Princeton University ...

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 ...

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 ...

While we all slip up from time to time, there are some basic punctuation mistakes you should never make in formal writing. For example, don't confuse "it's" and "its," don't use an apostrophe to ...