Fulcrum
That man was Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515) and I will happily admit I hadn't heard of him until about a year ago, but am now absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babie...
If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation.
The American essayist Lewis Thomas on the semicolon: The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added [ . . .] The period [or fu...
Humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes),
No valentines from the cats again.
We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first p...
The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs a...
I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons – and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsib...
I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons
Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of The Lord of the Rings. You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold.
One might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-taskin...
Yet there will always be a problem about getting rid of the hyphen: if it's not extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts. Phrase...
Thurber was asked by a correspondent: Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'? And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said abo...
Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point.
The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getti...
She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can't lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is upon her to see it in a different place.
Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation m...
Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.