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...
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...
The hyphen, the em dash, and the en dash are all horizontal marks of varying lengths. Each functions differently from the others. Below we define each mark, explain when to use them, and provide instructions for typing them on both PCs and Macs. (View our new...
An ellipsis consists of either three or four periods, or dots. A single dot is called an ellipsis point. The definition is pretty straightforward, but using ellipses can be tricky. Writers use ellipses for various reasons. An ellipsis can indicate the omission of...
If the number of page visits is a reliable indicator, this topic—using a comma before and—is on the minds of many people. The third most oft-visited on this site, this page garnered close to 10,000 hits in the past thirty days. (The most popular page—with twice as...
