A few years ago while copy editing an article, I was shocked to see something like this: “I lecture my sales staff about what I call ‘me syndrome,’” Jones said. What shocked me was the punctuation.

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 ...

Q. I sometimes need to type foot and inch marks in my documents, but Microsoft Word converts them to curly quote marks. Is there a way to bypass this behavior? A. For occasional straight quote marks, ...