Punctuation is the sturdy armature of written language, yet it does its job quietly, in the background. We tend to spend far ...

One of my students once told me that when she writes something she always puts a comma wherever she thinks someone should take a breath. She defended this by saying this is what they do in a musical ...

Comma was being tried in the Court of Grammar and Punctuation. The interrogators included Full Stop, Question Mark, Exclamation Point, Apostrophe, Hyphen, and Dash. You are really no use whatsoever.

The history of punctuation is the history of humanity,” argues Florence Hazrat, a researcher, in a rollicking new book. Often ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Andrew Heisel’s Lexicon Valley article last year on single versus double quotation marks piqued the ...

EVER wished the question mark and exclamation mark would get together? They did! It's called the interrobang and it's one of many punctation points you never knew about. Sure, we're all familiar with ...

The question mark, said Gertrude Stein, is “positively revolting”. She thought the exclamation mark was “ugly” and “unnecessary” too. Cormac McCarthy shuns the semi-colon and quotation marks. At times ...