When reading a classic book, we tend to pay attention to the themes, the characters, and the story. We say the words aloud. We notice everything, in fact, except for one crucial thing: the punctuation ...

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greeks wrote without any spaces, punctuations or distinction between capital letters or lowercase. To the modern eye this would look like undecipherable code: just capital ...

“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 ...

Crystal (Spell It Out) will delight anyone interested in written language with this exploration and explication of English’s deceptively complex system of punctuation. Rather than trying to convey how ...

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 ...

“Behind every punctuation mark lies a thousand stories,” writes David Crystal in his new book, Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation (Profile Books). He then fills the pages ...