Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point.
I’m sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a family th...
Isn't the analogy with good manners perfect? Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word 'punctilious' ('at...
I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no righ...
The Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an i...
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...
Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: That’s not writing, it’s typing? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing, and does...
No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked uo on the spot and buried i...
Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every...
In fact, it seemed to me that every single item on the news – concerning economic doom and political hypocrisy and social breakdown – was not news at all. What I could hear was just a series of utterl...
If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
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.
Semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends.
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...
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 is no more a class issue than the air we breathe. It is a system of printers' marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium, and if its time has come to...