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Facebook had a couple of interesting questions/examples on "so." SO I thought it would be good to take a look at them. This is my answer to the questions about the word "so" in the FB sentence belo...

Deciding to use a period versus a semicolon before "Is that correct?" and expecting your reader to distinguish that they mean something different is an exercise in extreme subtlety. This distinctio...

This is an email question from yesterday. ...…Okay. Now, you told us, Ms. Ryan -- right? -- at one point you got up you left the room and you went to the bathroom. Is that right? Amid all the o...

When the word so means "therefore," it starts a new sentence and takes a semicolon or period in front of it and no single comma after it because it is only one syllable. ...We left early; so I miss...

Thank you; thank you to the person that caught this in yesterday's blog. It said Generally there is a comma before a conjunctive adverb. When it has more than one syllable, it has a comma after i...

Sometimes an adverb gets pulled out to the beginning of a sentence to form a "bridge" to the sentence before it. It becomes a linking word for the two sentences and shows a relationship between the...

...I arrived on Saturday; he arrived on Sunday. ...He resigned in 2010; she resigned in 2011. ...The first train leaves at 5:00 A.M.; the last train leaves at 10:00 P.M. The Rule: When two sentenc...

I am going to start this topic today and will keep coming back to it over the next weeks. The question is what to do with an element that begins a second sentence after an and or but (or, nor). On...

We punctuate a fragment the same way that we punctuate the complete sentence it stands for. This is simply the way the language works. ...A With John. He had been ill. ...A I stayed with John....