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Reg Gothard - "Yonder Pedant"

Punctuation Malfunction

Coralling Text

Today’s article is about the placement of text and its accompanying punctuation in containers of various descriptions—parentheses, other-shaped brackets, and quotation marks. The Pond (The focus of this website is on Canadian English, with British and American English being discussed where relevant. Other varieties of English are out of scope.) As with so many things […]

The Possessive Apostrophe

There is so much material on the wonderweb about possessive apostrophes that I find it inconceivable that people still get it wrong. Yet I see it all the time, across all kinds of material, at all levels of supposed writing ability. There is one news website not a million miles from where I live that […]

Bang! Exclaimed Mark

This week’s post is about another abused punctuation symbol—the exclamation mark (or exclamation point as it’s known in the USA). In our email/text/facebook world, exclamation marks are no longer loners—they now hunt in packs, causing peace-loving sentences to arch their backs, look big, and sound intimidating in some way. A large number of people now […]

The Life Cycle of Hyphenation

Gosh – doesn’t that title sound riveting? Believe it or not (if you’re not a pedant, you likely won’t), people argue online about whether phrases such as “life cycle” should be written as one word, two words, or hyphenated. Normal people would just say, “Get a life!” and move on, but they don’t know what […]

Dash It—Who Knew?

How is it that something as unassuming as a punctuation mark can cause so much grief for so many people? The apostrophe is perhaps the biggest cause of grief, but the numerous variations of dash and hyphen must come a close second. For me personally, they cause more pauses—for thought—than the apostrophe. Before we go […]

Homophones 2 – Your

This is the second in a series of short pieces on homophones. (In case you’re puzzled by that word, it has nothing to do with telephones that all look the same.) Your and You’re (There’s also “Yore”) It’s difficult to make “your” and “you’re” sound different in most accents. However, as with most other homophones, […]

Homophones 1: There

This is the first in a series of short pieces on homophones. (In case you’re puzzled by that word, it has nothing to do with telephones that all look the same.) There, They’re and Their In most accents, these three words sound near enough to identical to make them homophones. However, when written, their not […]

Pluralization of Acronyms and Initialisms

It seems that more has been written on the use, disuse, misuse and abuse of the apostrophe than on any other punctuation topic in the English-speaking world. In comparison, there’s little on the misuse of semi-colons and colons; the humble comma is largely ignored (although I personally struggle, with its proper use, at times), and […]

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