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 ...

Harper Lee’s demand to lose the comma from the book title Go, Set a Watchman highlights the paucity of novels with the lowly punctuation mark Harper Lee took a firm stand on how exactly her second ...

Eats, Shoots & Leaves presents itself as a last-ditch defence of the subtleties of English punctuation. "Despair was the initial impetus for this book," writes Lynne Truss, and she begins by mustering ...

An entire class of readers has labeled me a comma criminal! The eighth-graders in Mrs. Craft’s honors English class at Briarcrest Christian School in Memphis gave me low marks for omitting a comma ...