The punctuation mark that annoys people the most is, without a doubt, the apostrophe. Whole books have been written lamenting atrocities like “five carrot’s and three kiwi’s” (for the record, that ...

This is the Grammar Guy column, a weekly feature written by Curtis Honeycutt. I can think of a few things off the top of my head that I hope never to use: math, a fire extinguisher, Pepto Bismol and ...

Picture this: A music reviewer makes a reference to the song “Space Truckin’” by Deep Purple. You want to quote him on it. Specifically, you want to quote a sentence in which the writer just happened ...

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll ...

We all know someone who uses air quotes in conversation, and we often mock this person. Comedian Chris Farley did a classic skit on “Saturday Night Live” about a goofy guy who uses air quotes for ...

Everyone knows that the world’s material resources — food, water, oil — are distributed unequally, but few realize that the same is true for punctuation. Take quotation marks: Some forms of writing, ...

Andrew Heisel’s Lexicon Valley article last year on single versus double quotation marks piqued the interest of Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and ...

Another annoying journalistic tic: the single-word quotation. I suppose that what, if anything, is in the reporter’s mind is an impulse to indicate that the subject’s exact words are being quoted. But ...