Produced in partnership with the Open University by Maggie Ayre for BBC Audio Bristol The Open University’s guide on dealing ...
“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 ...
Communication in the digital age has plenty of strange trappings. Periods can seem aggressive; complete, punctuated sentences can read as uptight. And then there's the strange space that's seemed to ...
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 ...
Not long ago, if I saw a sentence like “Tommy gets A’s and B’s,” I would have changed it to “Tommy gets A’s and Bs.” But only if I was working for a publication that followed Los Angeles Times’ ...
Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month.Become a Plus Member The following is the first of three excerpts from Keith Houston’s new book, Shady ...
If you’re reading this, you probably know a thing or two about punctuation. But nobody — including punctuation book authors (ahem) — knows it all. So here are some advanced punctuation tips for good ...
Because sometimes periods, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, brackets, parentheses, braces, and ellipses won’t do, here ...
It’s easy to take punctuation for granted after seeing commas, question marks and periods your whole life, but the reality is, punctuation is quite interesting, and some of the facts about it might ...