A moment's hesitation... Yes, a full stop here – but shouldn’t there be a comma there? Or would a hyphen be better? Punctuation can be a nuisance; it is often simply neglected. Wrong! The most recent ...

If you don't know how to punctuate an adverb clause or couldn't advise someone when to use a semicolon rather than a colon—even with a gun to your head—consider the two standards for punctuation in ...

Language maven Charles Harrington Elster joins Host Larry Mantle to talk all about mispronounced words, from “arctic” to “zoology.” Elster is the author of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: ...

Do you have an em dash problem? No? Lucky you. I do and, until the other day, I didn’t even know it was a problem. What is an em dash, you ask? Sorry, I should have ...

Notice anything wrong with those quotation marks, shown during NBC's broadcast of the Winter Olympics? They're wrong in a really bizarre way, so wrong that they offend columnist John Kelly. (John ...

Semicolon use by Americans has dropped by 51% since the early 2000s to once every 378 words; younger Americans say they still ...

I don’t know about you, but this year flew by. I feel like I looked up after summer and it was Thanksgiving, and now here we are at year’s end. As the sun sets on the end of this year — and if you ...

Gen Z thinks they’ve figured out a dead giveaway that someone has used ChatGPT — and it might surprise you. The em dash is punctuation loved by writers everywhere, functioning like a comma, colon or a ...

Open any social media site today, and you’ll find a slew of tweets, shorts, messages, videos, photos, and more — almost all written with lower capital letters and barely any punctuation. For me, that ...

What’s that finely milled sugar used in baking called? At The Washington Post, it’s “confectioners’ sugar.” At least one reader thinks it should be “confectioner’s sugar.” Some manufacturers don’t ...