I’ve gotten a lot of emails recently about where to put periods and commas relative to quotation marks. The notes were prompted by a recent column in which I mentioned that, in American English, a ...

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, ...

Punctuation is a set of specific marks or symbols that we used to express the meaning of our sentences clearly and to make the flow of the text smooth. It shows us where we need to pause, it separates ...

Whenever you write a description or story that contains spoken words, you must be careful to use correct punctuation in the speech. These are called speech or quotation marks, and the rules for using ...

Notice anything wrong with those quotation marks, shown during NBC's broadcast of the Winter Olympics? They're wrong in a really bizarre way, so wrong that they offend columnist John Kelly. (John ...

Not long ago, I mentioned in this space that a period or comma always comes before a closing quotation mark. For example: Beth used the word “covert,” not the word “clandestine.” I mentioned, too, ...