Liz in Newport Beach posed a good question about commas. Consider the following two sentences. “Days are usually great, but, when they aren’t great, they still pass in 24 hours.” “Every word should ...

Sex. Now that I have your attention, I’d like to discuss the fact that this sentence you’re reading is not necessarily a run-on sentence because run-on sentences are not simply sentences that run on ...

Time once again for a visit with our friend the comma. Or should that be our friend, the comma? Normal people don’t really care about the proper deployment of commas, but there are those of us who are ...

When you reach the end of a sentence, you need a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Phrases or subordinate clauses standing alone are missing a subject or a verb or are stated in such a way ...

What punctuation, if any, would you add to the following sentence? Exiting your host's bathroom after half an hour and saying "Don't worry; I fixed your toilet" is not an example of excellent ...

In order to make your writing clear, you need to use commas. As well as using them to separate out key information, or divide up different clauses, commas can also completely change the meaning of a ...

How do you know whether or not to set something off in commas in a sentence? Are the added words essential (restrictive) or not (nonrestrictive)? that limits the meaning of what it modifies. And it ...

When we're writing, we can add extra words to a sentence to give more information or explanation. We call the extra words that have been added a parenthesis. Parenthesis is a word or clause inserted ...

SEVERAL months ago I w as surprised to see Arnold Zwicky, a linguist, use a comma splice. A few commenters took me to task for being over-picky. The question came up again in the comments several days ...