“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 ...

Not long ago, if I saw a sentence like “Tommy gets A’s and B’s,” I would have changed it to “Tommy gets A’s and Bs.” But only if I was working for a publication that followed Los Angeles Times’ ...

Communication in the digital age has plenty of strange trappings. Periods can seem aggressive; complete, punctuated sentences can read as uptight. And then there's the strange space that's seemed to ...

Forget black rhinos and the Amazon rainforest: there’s something arguably just as precious joining the endangered species list, only this time, it’s a grammatical rather than biological extinction ...

A moment's hesitation... Yes, a full stop here—but shouldn't there be a comma there? Or would a hyphen be better? Punctuation can be a nuisance; it is often simply neglected. Wrong! The most recent ...

It’s easy to take punctuation for granted after seeing commas, question marks and periods your whole life, but the reality is, punctuation is quite interesting, and some of the facts about it might ...

As chatbots advance, they naturally become more intuitive because of advanced reasoning skills. For example, ChatGPT-5 understands context much better than legacy models like ChatGPT-4o, and Gemini ...

Because sometimes periods, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, brackets, parentheses, braces, and ellipses won’t do, here ...

“Thank you!!! We appreciate your business!!” writes a breathless customer service agent. “I’m sooo sorry!!!” writes an administrative assistant after making ...