Most great writers agonise over punctuation. Oscar Wilde wrote that revising one of his poems took a day: the morning to take a comma out, the afternoon to reinstate it. When Mark Twain heard that ...

Do not use semicolons.” So wrote Kurt Vonnegut in his 2005 essay collection A Man Without a Country; and so quotes Florence ...

Can parents ever learn to text like their kids? Should they even try?

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 ...

Today is a special holiday! Happy National Punctuation Day. Punctuation can be both the great love and the occasional bane of a writer's existence, and it's not strange that a love affair may crop up ...

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 ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Word, word, word, word, word, punctuation mark. This is how we read. Sometimes there are more words, ...