Writers can create tension in both of these ways using something as simple as varying their sentence lengths. Fiction writers can grab and hold their reader’s attention by creating tension. This can ...

Actor George Takei, who played the helmsman of the USS Enterprise on "Star Trek," recently posted the above image that depicts a strange example of a perfectly logical English sentence. It contains ...

Some short stories build to a single sentence. This is so common, actually, that it sometimes seems most of the stories I read are of this type. Readers are herded toward the shiny black nailhead of a ...

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 ...

An authority on the English language has set us free from the tethers of what many have long regarded as a grammatical no-no. Or has it? The answer depends on how you side with a declaration from ...

Semicolons must combine similar elements and are either used to combine complete sentences or items in a long, complicated list. Use semicolons in the following situations: Combine two complete ...

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 ...