One of my students once told me that when she writes something she always puts a comma wherever she thinks someone should take a breath. She defended this by saying this is what they do in a musical ...

Comma was being tried in the Court of Grammar and Punctuation. The interrogators included Full Stop, Question Mark, Exclamation Point, Apostrophe, Hyphen, and Dash. You are really no use whatsoever.

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 ...

Let’s hear it for the exclamation point! And what about the comma, and its cousin, the semi-colon? Without punctuation our language would be as difficult to read as an unedited “Trivially Speaking” ...

Anyone who knows, or intuitively understands, that two words describing a noun are hyphenated ends up writing some compounds ...

There's a well-worn joke that if you call a copy editor anal-retentive, he'll look that up to see if it's hyphenated. It is, I am, and it's my job. Many people can give dignified one-word answers to ...

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 ...