Q: Years (and years!) ago when I learned grammar and usage from the Sisters of St. Joseph in a Brooklyn, N.Y., grammar school, a series of nouns used a comma to separate the nouns until the last one, ...

When you're writing or typing and begin to list items in consecutive order, do you add a comma prior to the conjunction before the final item? Or not? The inclusion of that final comma is a great ...

Liz in Newport Beach, Calif., posed a good question about commas. Consider the following two sentences. "Days are usually great, but, when they aren't great, they still pass in 24 hours." "Every word ...

One of my students once told me that when she writes something she always puts a comma wherever she thinks someone should take a breath. She defended this by saying this is what they do in a musical ...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, it seems, is a little obsessive about commas. According to press reports, he’s been sending out directives to staff that they should follow certain strict guidelines.

THE OXFORD COMMA is a form of punctuation – but it’s become a cause of much debate over its usage. So when should you use it and where? We all use commas when writing lists of things. But the Oxford ...

There’s no denying that commas are helpful little flecks of punctuation. They allow us to separate written clauses and do good work when especially numerous or complicated groups of things exist in a ...

I am, unapologetically, an over-user of commas. Case in point: I could have written the previous sentence as, "I am an unapologetic over-user of commas," but opted not to. I wished to emphasize just ...

The Romans and the Ancient Greeks didn’t use punctuation at all. They didn’t even have gaps between words. This is called scriptio continua, writing as one continuous string of capital letters, so ...