One of my students once told me that when she writes something she always puts a comma wherever she thinks someone should take a breath. She defended this by saying this is what they do in a musical ...

There's a well-worn joke that if you call a copy editor anal-retentive, he'll look that up to see if it's hyphenated. It is, I am, and it's my job. Many people can give dignified one-word answers to ...

For writers at work, punctuation can slip from a matter of convention to one of obsession. I just finished my poetry thesis last week, and I’m embarrassed to admit the number of times I changed ...

This is a playful meditation on the power of punctuation as a metaphor for human connection, love and the rhythms of everyday life. The poem intertwines ...

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 ...

As the keeper of the comma shaker here at The New Yorker, I feel obliged to respond to the characterization of our house style regarding commas, in Ben Yagoda’s recent post for the New York Times blog ...

There's a well-worn joke that if you call a copy editor anal-retentive, he'll look that up to see if it's hyphenated. It is, I am, and it's my job. Many people can give dignified one-word answers to ...