In a recent informal Twitter survey of which punctuation marks one would marry, kill, or you-know-what, we found a strong reaction in favor of keeping the em-dash alive. Others preferred the ...

Today is a special holiday! Happy National Punctuation Day. Punctuation can be both the great love and the occasional bane of a writer's existence, and it's not strange that a love affair may crop up ...

The following is the first of three excerpts from Keith Houston’s new book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. The orthographic world of ancient ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Punctuation is not the sort of subject that readily gets the juices flowing, but for every staid comma or colon there ...

Whenever you write a description or story that contains spoken words, you must be careful to use correct punctuation in the speech. These are called speech or quotation marks, and the rules for using ...

Commas, semicolons and question marks are so commonplace it seems as if they were always there – but that’s not the case. Keith Houston explains their history. As readers and writers, we’re intimately ...

Several writers and inventors in the last century tried to introduce new marks of punctuation into the English language – but they all failed. Keith Houston tells their story. In the 1930s and ’40s, ...