“People don’t know why they get so upset about language,” David Crystal told me recently, over Skype from his home in Wales. “ ‘Potato’s,’ with an apostrophe ‘S,’ ” he offered, as an example of the ...

Punctuation is a set of specific marks or symbols that we used to express the meaning of our sentences clearly and to make the flow of the text smooth. It shows us where we need to pause, it separates ...

“Behind every punctuation mark lies a thousand stories,” writes David Crystal in his new book, Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation (Profile Books). He then fills the pages ...

“Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,” a report by the language-learning website Babbel proclaimed in May. Their findings had the desired effect.

The em dash, one of the most versatile punctuation marks in English, has become widely associated with AI-generated text ...