It has come to my attention that people often don’t know how to use commas properly, so I’ll point out a misuse that has been bugging me lately. See the sentence above? It contains two independent ...

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 ...

When you reach the end of a sentence, you need a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Phrases or subordinate clauses standing alone are missing a subject or a verb or are stated in such a way ...

Serial commas made headlines a few weeks ago when a court decided that the absence of a serial comma made a law ambiguous. In this space last week, I begged to differ. But I didn’t have enough space ...