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I was recently asked whether I would recommend a semicolon before "Is that fair?" just as it is before "Is that right?" The answer is that right, true, and correct in any of their various forms are...

When two prepositional phrases come at the beginning of a sentence, without regard to how long or short each is, there is usually a comma after the second one. ...At the beginning of the night, we...

This is a sentence I was asked about on Facebook. And I have it correctly punctuated here. Have there been any major stressful events in the last year that you can think of -- divorce? someone, a ...

We so often see the apostrophe used in the wrong place. Here I want to talk about just one of those instances. When the word the is used in front of a surname, the name HAS to be plural. We do no...

This is an issue that is VERY misunderstood. I am copying here the section from my book, beginning on page 401 in the chapter on "Where NOT to Put Punctuation." Normally, I do not copy an entire se...

The rule says to put a question mark at the end of a sentence that asks a question. In reporting, our questions are not always straightforward. Attorneys add things -- explanations, clarifications,...

Have you noticed that we don't seem to get conventions here in Los Angeles? Why doesn't NCRA come here? Well, we won't go into the possible answers for that question. Instead, here you go! August ...

When a compound noun that is two words has a prefix or suffix, hyphenate the prefix to the first word or the suffix to the last word and leave the compound noun as separate words. ...pre-high scho...

The word please takes punctuation according to where it is in relation to what it modifies. At the beginning of what it modifies, it takes no punctuation after it. ...Please put that notice into ...