“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 ...

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 ...

Are you manic about misplaced commas? Apoplectic over rogue apostrophes? Distressed by the disappearing question mark? You don’t have to be an outspoken member of the punctuation police to know the ...

One of the difficulties about punctuation is that a lot of it is down to personal preference or “style”. And that isn’t just a recent thing, to be blamed on textspeak and the belief that the world is ...