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...
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...
Recently I came across two expressions sorely in need of a well-placed colon. The first appeared in the Washington Post*: Although the vaccines remain remarkably effective, the virus has bountiful opportunities to find new ways to evade immunity. Most of the world...
The comma is perhaps the trickiest mark of punctuation to teach and to learn, largely because we seem to have multiple exceptions for every rule. Elsewhere on this site we have written about the Oxford (serial) comma, a usage issue hotly debated in both linguistic and...
Have you ever been stuck trying to decide whether to use which or that? While both pronouns can be used in other constructions, the confusion usually arises when they are being used as relative pronouns to introduce adjective (or relative) clauses. In the examples...
Writers frequently wonder whether a comma should go before the conjunction and in a list of three or more items. Despite the fact that not all style books agree on this issue, we recommend using a comma after the next-to-last item in a series—the serial comma, as it...
