punctuation
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All the Exclaiming Ladies
The exclamation point doesn’t mean what you think it does anymore. At The Huffington Post, Maddie Crum explores the punctuation mark’s changing and increasingly gendered usage: instead of conveying strong emotion, the mark now connotes levity, and apparently women are…
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Serial Commas, Subordinate Clauses, and the New Yorker
Mary Norris has a gift for your favorite grammarian in this week’s New Yorker: a detailed account of comma policy from a veteran copyeditor. The magazine is notorious for its meticulous house style (where else do you still see a…
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A Parenthetical Suffering
According to Christopher Benfey, literature has a long history of writers including characters’ personal struggles in parentheses within the text. To learn how that worked in Nabokov’s “Lolita” or Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” (and to discover that there’s an…
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The Decline of Punctuation?!…
We live in a heyday of punctuation. “Call this what you will—exclamatory excess, punctuation inflation, the result of the Internet’s limitless expanse—it is everywhere,” writes Megan Garber at the Atlantic. But perhaps not for long—with the rise of image-based expression…
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The Pleasure of Perfectly Positioned Punctuation
As conscientious writers know, punctuation can make all the difference in a sentence, sculpting mush into meaning or cluing the reader in to nuances of intonation. Vulture’s Kathryn Schulz has compiled some of literature’s most effective and memorable instances of…
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A Period in the Age of Texting
As we consider the limits of English punctuation, we should also consider the place of the period. According to Ben Crair at The New Republic, the period no longer signifies a neutral end to a sentence, but in the age of…
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The Punctuation Problem
We didn’t know there was one until Slate‘s Matthew Malady pointed out the limitations of English punctuation. Look, I’m the last one to encourage the excessive use of exclamation points. But if we are going to use them—and they do…