Present tense speech tags and fancy speech tags. Speech tags, or quotation attributions, are terms like “the mayor said.” ...

“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 ...

More and more frequently, polished writing raises suspicion. The everyday techniques taught in grammar school are being ...

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 ...

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 ...

Punctuation marks may be small, but they carry a lot of weight—shaping tone, clarifying meaning and even signaling the writer’s personality. I adore the em dash; I tend to be a bit of a drama queen ...

Is nothing sacred anymore? Now we can’t even text — text, the thing millennials practically invented on T9 keyboards — without being called out by Gen Z. The generation who banned skinny jeans and ...