“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

I was a novice editor, he was an experienced writer, and the first article he turned in revealed a virtuosic command of comma placement. He opened with long, slow clauses; picked up speed with shorter ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. The following is the first of three excerpts from Keith Houston’s new book, Shady Characters: The ...

Punctuation is the homely, workaday cousin to the glamorous word. It works quietly in the background, sweeping up and trying to keep the information flow tidy, while words prance around spilling ...

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 ...

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 ...

Several writers and inventors in the last century tried to introduce new marks of punctuation into the English language – but they all failed. Keith Houston tells their story. In the 1930s and ’40s, ...