Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is the serial comma. Here's a listener: Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Patti from Houston... Patti and her friends are debating about the serial commathe comma that comes before the final conjunction in a list. Here's a se...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is how to format questions. You think you already know this, don't you? I wonder if you're right. Everybody knows how write a plain vanilla question: What's new? They're called direct questions. But there are trickier...
Grammar Girl here. Surprise! You get a bonus show today because Thursday is National Punctuation Day and I'm going to have a slightly different kind of podcast to celebrate. Today's topic is semicolons. I get a lot of questions about semicolons, so i...
Grammar Girl here. This week I have two topics for you: The number of spaces after a period at the end of a sentence, and whether you should use who or that to refer to people (and pets). Now here's our first listener question. His friends believe it...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is how to format vertical lists. Most of the grammar books I own only partially address vertical lists. One book discusses capitalization, another partially discusses punctuation, and so on. Only the Chicago Manual of...
Grammar Girl here. Today I'm going to talk about how to format Web addresses for print documents and websites. URLs and Terminal Punctuation A listener named Aileen recently asked how to deal with a Web address at the end of a sentence. Should she pu...
Today I have a special show for you because it's September 24: National Punctuation Day, a holiday created by an educator named Jeff Rubin. To celebrate the day I had a punctuation contest and today's show highlights two of the winners. Other winners...
by Mignon Fogarty People often ask how to use ellipses, those little dot-dot-dots you often see in e-mail messages. For example, Mitra from Michigan asked, When is it appropriate to use '...' in writing? People use it all the time, and it seems like...
Grammar Girl here. Today guest-writer Bonnie Trenga will help us talk about two kinds of peculiar questions. Isnt that going to be fun! Isn't that going to be fun, is a rhetorical question. Were also going to learn about its cousin. Thats called a ta...
by Mignon Fogarty Many parts of the world are moving from standard time to daylight-saving time (also called summer time) this week, so I thought it would be a good time to talk about the phrase daylight-saving time and time in general. The original...
By Mignon Fogarty Today I'll explain the difference between dashes, commas, and parentheses. Stever Robbins, the host of the Get-It-Done Guy podcast, has been writing a book, and his birthday is today. He told me that his birthday wish would be for m...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is dashes. Last week when I was speaking at the Field's End Writers Conference on Bainbridge Island, someone in the audience asked about dashes. When should she use a dash and how is it different from a colon? Dashes...
By Mignon Fogarty I decided to write about comma splices because my friend Scott Sigler has a book coming out this week, Ancestor, published by Crown. Over three years ago, when he was publishing an earlier version of the book with a smaller publishe...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is how to use colons. Sallie in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and a listener named Mike wondered when to use a colon and when to capitalize the first word after a colon. One of my favorite grammar books, titled* Punctuate...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is the asterisk. Why? Because Barry Bonds just broke the record for number of home runs in one season* and people are talking about putting an asterisk next to his name in the record book because of the steroid contro...
