“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 concept borrowed from communication theory and applied to family systems and other arenas of conflict. Bateson provided the example of a couple in which one partner nags and the other ...

Some punctuation marks get all of the attention. The serial comma, for example, is a hot topic, with 11 million Google hits plus another 11 million if you search its other name, Oxford comma.

A few years back I set out to write a comprehensive punctuation book — one that laid out the rules for proper punctuation in every situation imaginable. How naïve I was. You don’t have to spend a lot ...

While we all slip up from time to time, there are some basic punctuation mistakes you should never make in formal writing. For example, don't confuse "it's" and "its," don't use an apostrophe to ...

Conflict is an inherent part of human interaction, particularly when navigating power, influence, and persuasion. It’s no surprise that many of the posts on this page address the complexities of ...

If you’ve spent the weekend enjoying a good book in the May sun, you might not have been thinking about mathematics. But if you were reading a book in a Western language, there’s a good chance that ...