Everyone knows that the world’s material resources — food, water, oil — are distributed unequally, but few realize that the same is true for punctuation. Take quotation marks: Some forms of writing, ...

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll ...

I’ve gotten a lot of emails recently about where to put periods and commas relative to quotation marks. The notes were prompted by a recent column in which I mentioned that, in American English, a ...

Punctuation is a set of specific marks or symbols that we used to express the meaning of our sentences clearly and to make the flow of the text smooth. It shows us where we need to pause, it separates ...

Recently in this space we talked about how, when two punctuation marks bump up against each other, one can sometimes preclude the other. For example, a phrase that would normally be followed by a ...

A colon should follow ‘IE,’ and commas would come in handy after ‘exposed’ and ‘change.’ ‘You’re’ is a contraction that means ‘you are;’ ‘your’ is the possessive form of ‘you.’ If we use our noodles, ...