And if you add the wrong punctuation mark or leave it out, you may regret it. Suddenly, that little dot or dash you barely ...

“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 ...

Not long ago, if I saw a sentence like “Tommy gets A’s and B’s,” I would have changed it to “Tommy gets A’s and Bs.” But only if I was working for a publication that followed Los Angeles Times’ ...

The digital age has not been kind to the English language. Capitalization, proper spelling, and punctuation long ago became optional when texting friends or chatting online. The period was one of the ...

An exclamation point ( ! ) is used to end a sentence expressing strong emotion or commands (Stop!), and may be used to close questions that are meant to convey extreme emotion (What were you thinking!

One of the difficulties about punctuation is that a lot of it is down to personal preference or “style”. And that isn’t just a recent thing, to be blamed on textspeak and the belief that the world is ...

Forget black rhinos and the Amazon rainforest: there’s something arguably just as precious joining the endangered species list, only this time, it’s a grammatical rather than biological extinction ...

Are you manic about misplaced commas? Apoplectic over rogue apostrophes? Distressed by the disappearing question mark? You don’t have to be an outspoken member of the punctuation police to know the ...

Email is basically unavoidable at this point. Whether you’re firing off messages at work, submitting assignments for school or introducing yourself to someone you’ve never met, you're going to use ...