The semicolon is the comma's first cousin, but it works a little bit harder; it also makes you look smarter. So what are the practical ways to implement this little grammatical workhorse? Read on to ...

Colons and semicolons are the indie rock of punctuation marks. They’re not mainstream-popular like the period. They aren’t obvious and eager-to-please like the exclamation mark. They’re not everywhere ...

I’ve talked about colons more than once in this column, but my focus is usually limited in scope. I zoom in on the little questions, like how many spaces to put after a colon and whether it should be ...

This is probably the best-known way to use a colon. You can use it to introduce a list or series, as in, “I’m excited for my classes this semester: Biology, History, English, and Algebra.” Here’s ...

If you’re looking for a grammatical convention guaranteed to spark an unnecessarily outraged debate, look no further than the Oxford comma [Editor’s note: I don’t know that I’d call it unnecessary].