This is the Grammar Guy column, a weekly feature written by Curtis Honeycutt. I can think of a few things off the top of my head that I hope never to use: math, a fire extinguisher, Pepto Bismol and ...

Quotation marks are used to set off a person's words, whether spoken or written. They are placed at both the beginning and end of the quote. Ex: Sue remarked, "I'll meet you at the movies," A comma is ...

I’ve gotten a lot of emails recently about where to put periods and commas relative to quotation marks. The notes were prompted by a recent column in which I mentioned that, in American English, a ...

The punctuation mark that annoys people the most is, without a doubt, the apostrophe. Whole books have been written lamenting atrocities like “five carrot’s and three kiwi’s” (for the record, that ...

A quotation is a phrase taken directly from a text or speech. These punctuation marks should contain the words taken from the text: In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens the character of Scrooge is ...

Everyone knows that the world’s material resources — food, water, oil — are distributed unequally, but few realize that the same is true for punctuation. Take quotation marks: Some forms of writing, ...

Someone says something brilliant. It’s so clever that it gets shared and many people come to hear about it. When it’s shared, this is how it’s done. Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, And all ...

In a quotation it’s important to make sure you use the exact words from the original text. In most critical essays, it’s better to use shorter quotations in a precise way rather than write out very ...