Comma questions keep cropping up online, and will forever, because the simple punctuation mark serves two different functions, which are blurred in usage. Some are necessary grammatically, some ...

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 ...

For writers at work, punctuation can slip from a matter of convention to one of obsession. I just finished my poetry thesis last week, and I’m embarrassed to admit the number of times I changed ...

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll ...

Punctuation helps the reader understand a story. Commas, periods, dashes and other marks convey the writer’s voice. They signal an emphasis or tone in language, as well as tell a reader when to stop ...

Liz in Newport Beach posed a good question about commas. Consider the following two sentences. “Days are usually great, but, when they aren’t great, they still pass in 24 hours.” “Every word should ...

I am, unapologetically, an over-user of commas. Case in point: I could have written the previous sentence as, "I am an unapologetic over-user of commas," but opted not to. I wished to emphasize just ...

Serial commas made headlines a few weeks ago when a court decided that the absence of a serial comma made a law ambiguous. In this space last week, I begged to differ. But I didn’t have enough space ...

Punctuation marks aren't just resigned to the symbols on your keyboard. There are plenty more - like the exclamation comma - that never made it into type but nonetheless exist. The exclamation comma ...