“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Is nothing sacred anymore? Now we can’t even text — text, the thing millennials practically invented on T9 keyboards — without being called out by Gen Z. The generation who banned skinny jeans and ...

Statistical analysis of classic literature has shown that the way punctuation breaks up text obeys certain universal mathematical relationships. James Joyce's tome "Finnegans Wake," however, famously ...

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 ...