Do you insert one space or two after a period? Many people are surprisingly (even absurdly) passionate about their preference, yet this seemingly minor issue is not nearly as cut-and-dried as it may at first appear. A Little Background on a Longstanding Debate The...
Each year, as the festive season approaches and people make plans to send holiday greetings, many of us would benefit from a reminder about how to make last names plural. (Hint: Apostrophes need not apply.) If we pause to think, we will likely remember that...
This site addresses a number of punctuation issues, including punctuating with quotation marks, choosing between parentheses and dashes, using the semicolon and colon, and deciding when to use the Oxford comma. Here we are focusing specifically on punctuating with...
The rules for capitalizing words in sentences (as opposed to capitalizing words in headings or the titles of publications or a person’s job title or military rank) seem simple at first glance: we capitalize proper words, and we lowercase common ones. But because...
In another article, we address the challenge of knowing when words need to be capitalized in sentences because they are proper and not common nouns. This article focuses on the narrower question of when to capitalize a job title or military rank. Just Say No: Chances...
In the past we’ve discussed the confusion surrounding plurals and possessives (should we write “Happy holidays from the Smith’s” or “the Smiths”?). Making that distinction is arguably one of the trickier issues in English usage. Another is confusion about commonly...
