“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 ...

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 ...

Researchers at three business schools across the United States tested the effects of exclamation points on a variety of ...

Recently in this space we talked about how, when two punctuation marks bump up against each other, one can sometimes preclude the other. For example, a phrase that would normally be followed by a ...

“How do you feel about commas after em dashes?” a writer asked on Twitter recently. “For instance: If you want to have a great Sunday — and by ‘great’ I mean emotionally and spiritually satisfying —, ...