Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. The little word “and,” we probably all know, is a conjunction. It connects things: “She is tall and thin” means she is ...

In the first part of the series on “Understanding the conventions of academic writing”, I discussed these two common error patterns: i) Missing comma after ...

brendan-c on flickr John ate a slice of pepperoni pizza, and drank a bottle of beer. If that sentence doesn't make you involuntarily scowl, then you do not have a proper understanding of commas. Yet ...

When we write things down, it's important to keep things nice and clear, so it's easy to read. Sentences help us give an order, ask a question, state a fact, or express an emotion or idea. Words are ...

The début of our new series on language in all its facets: grammar, syntax, vocabulary, spelling, usage, and punctuation. In this episode, Mary Norris talks about commas. at the New Yorker, sometimes ...

If, for example, the word 'and' precedes a clause beginning 'although', you usually put a comma after it and, if it precedes a conditional clause, you normally insert a comma as well. Michael Bulley, ...

Writers choose and build different types of sentences carefully. There are three main types of sentence structure - simple close simple sentenceA sentence containing one clause made up of a subject ...

While we all slip up from time to time, there are some basic punctuation mistakes you should never make in formal writing. For example, don't confuse "it's" and "its," don't use an apostrophe to ...