There’s nothing wrong with hyphenating “multi-cultural.” There’s nothing wrong with not hyphenating “multicultural.” There’s nothing wrong with doing it both ways in a single document. But it’s very ...

Good questions have been piling up in my in-box lately. Ed in Albany had a question about a recent column in which I mentioned people "who just won't stop using the word 'over' wrong." Here's Ed: "Isn ...

Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes are frequently tested punctuation marks in government exam descriptive writing papers. Hyphens connect words, en dashes show ranges or relationships, and em dashes ...

Call me crazy. I'm dog-sitting this weekend, and we already have three dogs of our own. The visiting dog is a 1-year-old miniature beagle, and our beagle mix thinks he's a long-lost brother. They race ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. During the recent gathering of the American Copy Editors Society, a lot of “hyphen” jokes made the rounds. One was “Why we ...

It seems we're always declaring our great fondness for this punctuation mark or that one. Oh, the whimsical nature of the semicolon and how smart she makes us feel. Oh, the gorgeous curves of the ...