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

“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 ...

The digital age has not been kind to the English language. Capitalization, proper spelling, and punctuation long ago became optional when texting friends or chatting online. The period was one of the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...