This is part of a series about the humble comma, and summarizes some of the thirty-something uses for it that I haven’t covered in previous articles. The comma is used to indicate a structural break in a sentence. It can indicate connection with or separation of elements one from another. When reading out loud, it […]
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Commas and Relative Clauses
This is part of a series about the humble comma, and discusses its role (or lack thereof) in relative clauses. What Is a Relative Clause? First, let’s get the gag out of the way. Relative clauses are not parts of a will that define what you’re leaving to your nephews and nieces. There. Now we […]
Commas in Lists
This article is part of a series about the humble comma, and discusses its role in making sense of lists. It is unusual to see a (bulleted) vertical list in forms of writing such as novels, newspaper articles, poetry, editorials and op-eds, and dictionary entries; comma-separated lists are used instead. Such lists are referred to […]
Commas and Introductory Clauses
This article is part of a series about the humble comma, and discusses its role as a separator of introductory clauses. When deciding where to use commas, look carefully at your sentence to see where a pause or logical separation is required. The above was an example of an introductory clause. “When deciding where to […]
The Comma Splice
This article is the first in a series about the humble comma, and deals with a situation in which a comma should not be used. The unwary among us might be tempted to write something like the following. I know all about punctuation, I use it every time I write something. He was miles away, […]
Displaying Formatting Marks
One of the things that most users of MS Office don’t do is to have the various formatting marks visible. I like to have them all showing. Having never worked with other writers, I don’t know if I’m different from or the same as them. What Are the Formatting Marks? Formatting marks are glyphs that […]
Em Dashes
This is part four of a four- or five-part series on dashes and hyphens that is intended to replace an earlier article. Part one deals purely with the mechanics of producing a given dash/rule/sign/glyph in a document using four MS Office products; Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Publisher. Part two deals with hyphenation, the different kinds […]
En Dashes
This is part three of a four- or five-part series on dashes and hyphens that is intended to replace an earlier article. Part one deals purely with the mechanics of producing a given dash/rule/sign/glyph in a document using four MS Office products; Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Publisher. Part two deals with hyphenation, the different kinds […]
Hyphenation
This is part two of a four- or five-part series on dashes and hyphens that is intended to replace an earlier article. Part one deals purely with the mechanics of producing a given dash/rule/sign/glyph in a document using four MS Office products; Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Publisher. Part two (this article) deals with hyphenation, the […]
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 […]
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