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.

We all know how important punctuation marks are in our scripts, because punctuation fills our writing with expression. We pause, stop, emphasise, or question using a comma, a period, an exclamation ...

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 ...

In a recent informal Twitter survey of which punctuation marks one would marry, kill, or you-know-what, we found a strong reaction in favor of keeping the em-dash alive. Others preferred the ...

The question mark, said Gertrude Stein, is “positively revolting”. She thought the exclamation mark was “ugly” and “unnecessary” too. Cormac McCarthy shuns the semi-colon and quotation marks. At times ...