Comma questions keep cropping up online, and will forever, because the simple punctuation mark serves two different functions, which are blurred in usage. Some are necessary grammatically, some ...

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 ...

For most people, a stray comma isn’t the end of the world. But in some cases, the exact placement of a punctuation mark can cost huge sums of money. We’re bidding farewell to 2018 with some of BBC ...

Now that the end of August and beginning of the school year loom, English teachers everywhere are girding their loins and lacing their corsets, readying themselves for the noble challenge of making ...

Serial commas made headlines a few weeks ago when a court decided that the absence of a serial comma made a law ambiguous. In this space last week, I begged to differ. But I didn’t have enough space ...

I am, unapologetically, an over-user of commas. Case in point: I could have written the previous sentence as, "I am an unapologetic over-user of commas," but opted not to. I wished to emphasize just ...

There's a well-worn joke that if you call a copy editor anal-retentive, he'll look that up to see if it's hyphenated. It is, I am, and it's my job. Many people can give dignified one-word answers to ...

Commas had been explained to us based on a rather simple rationale: say the sentence out loud and place a comma wherever you feel the need to take a breath. Of course, there’s much more to it than ...