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 ...

You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Everyone knows that there’s only one use for single quotation marks, and that’s to denote a quote ...

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 ...

Much has been said about misused quotation marks. Photos of signs boasting about "fresh" seafood and "free" refills abound on the Internet, offering a good laugh at the expense of business owners who ...

Picture this: A music reviewer makes a reference to the song “Space Truckin’” by Deep Purple. You want to quote him on it. Specifically, you want to quote a sentence in which the writer just happened ...

Andrew Heisel’s Lexicon Valley article last year on single versus double quotation marks piqued the interest of Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and ...

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll ...

Everyone knows that the world’s material resources — food, water, oil — are distributed unequally, but few realize that the same is true for punctuation. Take quotation marks: Some forms of writing, ...

Use keyboard shortcuts, HTML codes, or the Windows Character Map This article explains how to type and use curly quote marks (also called smart quotes) and apostrophes in all versions of Microsoft ...

In the last paragraph of my column "How To Debug a PowerShell Script," I mentioned that punctuation can be problematic in PowerShell strings. I often catch myself omitting apostrophes, for example, ...