This is the Grammar Guy column, a weekly feature written by Curtis Honeycutt. I can think of a few things off the top of my head that I hope never to use: math, a fire extinguisher, Pepto Bismol and ...

The punctuation mark that annoys people the most is, without a doubt, the apostrophe. Whole books have been written lamenting atrocities like “five carrot’s and three kiwi’s” (for the record, that ...

I’ve gotten a lot of emails recently about where to put periods and commas relative to quotation marks. The notes were prompted by a recent column in which I mentioned that, in American English, a ...

We all know someone who uses air quotes in conversation, and we often mock this person. Comedian Chris Farley did a classic skit on “Saturday Night Live” about a goofy guy who uses air quotes for ...

What is the proper style for inserting a person’s nickname into his or her written full name? Most stylebooks specify placing the nickname after the forename and enclosing it in quotation marks. Some ...

I can think of a few things off the top of my head that I hope never to use: math, a fire extinguisher, Pepto Bismol, and the flotation device on the bottom of my seat cushion on an airplane. In ...

If you ever see a typography lover, smeared with blood, bellowing while holding a steaming human heart above his head, the point of contention was very probably the use of smart quotes versus dumb ...