I know what you’re saying: “Kevin, not another article about quotation marks!” (Okay, probably four people are saying, “Ooh, another article about quotation marks!” But they’re in the minority.) My topic today concerns those authors who have decided they’re too good to use quotation marks. They have to come up with some novel concept for quoted material, but that non-standard invention never works quite as well as the tried-and-true. Continue reading ‘authors who don’t use quotation marks’
Tag Archive for 'punctuation'
Here’s another one for you punctuation maniacs out there. When you get to a closing quotation mark, a number of different rules govern whether certain punctuation marks (such as periods, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points) go inside or outside of that closing quote. In proper American usage, there are three different categories: Continue reading ‘people who don’t put commas and period inside closing quote marks’
It seems like half of the apostrophes I see are used incorrectly. People get confused, I think, because they aren’t able to understand the difference between a plural and a possessive, and they get caught up in a tangle of s‘s and apostrophes. A plural means there’s more than one of something. In that case, you almost never use an apostrophe. The only exceptions, basically, are when you’re dealing with something that’s italicized (such as a book title, magazine title, non-English word, etc.), when you’re dealing with abbreviations that have periods in them, or in a few words or phrases where it’s become standard (“do’s and don’ts,” for example). Continue reading ‘misused apostrophes’