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 ...

Quotation marks are used to set off a person's words, whether spoken or written. They are placed at both the beginning and end of the quote. Ex: Sue remarked, "I'll meet you at the movies," A comma is ...

Andrew Heisel’s Lexicon Valley article last year on single versus double quotation marks piqued the interest of Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and ...

American presidents have often been noteworthy writers. Jefferson was an audacious native version of an 18th-century But there has never been a president whose writing has been as in our face -- from ...

I can think of a few things off the top of my head that I hope never to use: math, a fire extinguisher, Pepto-Bismol, and the flotation device on the bottom of my seat cushion on an airplane. In ...

It’s now more than two months since I started blogging. It has not always been trouble-free. Two months ago, all I knew about WordPress was that it was software bloggers used. For a change of pace ...