Related Articles

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  A Little Too Much Two-Buck Chuck

  917 readersFor me, the best apostrophe catastrophes are those committed by entities I don't like. I love to point out the flaws of Coors Light, the Lakers, or Valentine's Day, but I feel a little bit guilty posting punctuation errors from places I admire. Case in point: Trader Joe's. Oh how I love your

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  Kentucky American Is…

  1119 readersMark, who sent in this apostrophe catastrophe, thinks maybe there is only one Kentuckian with a disability.Well, if the inability to use proper punctuation counts as a disability, that one Kentuckian designed this logo. And doesn't the whole concept of Kentucky American's [sic] seem redundant?Thanks, Mark! Check out Mark's blog here.

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  Apostrophe in Mother’s Day

  3361 readersStyle guides traditionally call for the apostrophe in Mother's Day to be placed between the r and the s because the holiday is supposed to honor one's own mother. But in this day and age, should we rethink the apostrophe placement to accommodate nontraditional families? This cartoon from the New Yorker provides food for thought.Thanks

• Tangled Passages

  1812 readersA pileup of dashes and commas in a sentence should be a warning sign. Sometimes the punctuation itself is the source of the problem, leading to snarled syntax. In other cases, the commas and dashes are a symptom. As a sentence gets more and more convoluted, the writer desperately clutches at punctuation to hold it

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  Virginia Woolf

  3114 readers"I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street."

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  Satanic Apostrophe Catastrophe

  1554 readersGlenn Danzig, I don't know a lot about religion, but isn't there only supposed to be one Satan?Clearly, the devil removed the apostrophe from this album cover. The wikipedia entry, and even the URL for the wikipedia entry, include the proper apostrophe...

• A Quiz About Parenthetical Punctuation

  3836 readersEm dashes are woefully underused and misused. Here are five sentences that would be much improved by their proper use, or by proper use of other punctuation in cooperation with them. Determine how each sentence would benefit from changes in punctuation and compare your revisions with my suggested solutions at the bottom of the page: 1.

• A Guide to Colloquial Contractions

  4283 readersLet’s talk about the dos and don’ts of contractions, ’k? (But first, this note: This punctuation mark is the same as the one used for apostrophes. However, if you use smart, or curly, quotes, your word processing program will probably incorrectly render an apostrophe not preceded by a letter — as in the last word in

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  Punctuation Is Powerful

  8100 readersThe image we published last Saturday was quite popular, so I decided to run another one this Saturday. The theme is the same: punctuation. For those who can’t see the image, here’s what it says: An English professor wrote the words: “A woman without her man is nothing” on the chalkboard he asked the students to punctuate it correctly. All

• 10 Websites and Blogs of Punctuation Protectors

  15948 readersIn honor of National Punctuation Day, commemorated on September 24 (you didn’t forget, did you?), here’s a directory of Web sites documenting, usually with photographs, egregious punctuation errors. First, by the way, note that the founder of National Punctuation Day, a freelance business-newsletter writer named Jeff Rubin, sponsors a Punctuation Paragraph Contest. The only rule is