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It’s one of the trickiest punctuation dilemmas: when you are using direct speech, and you break what the speaker says, do you put the comma before or after the closing quotation mark? Should it be ‘I went shopping’, Tim said, ‘to buy a new suit for the wedding’. or ‘I went shopping,’ Tim said, ‘to
While there are plenty of places where commas should be used and a few places where commas are optional, there are some places where commas should never be used: between the main focus of a sentence and the action it is performing: in technical terms, between the subject and verb between the action being performed
Looking forward to the new year? Perhaps you’re planning to forgo (or should that be forego?) a relaxing holiday and replace it with a disciplined approach to some new lifestyle habits? Perhaps those around you will need to show a little forbearance (or should that be forebearance?) as you try to settle into a new
Whoever thought punctuation wasn’t important? One little, seemingly insignificant comma cost a Canadian company more than $2 million. Consider the next two sentences and consider what the difference in meaning is. The question is: how long does the agreement have to last until it is terminated? [The agreement] shall continue in force for a period
There are many rules in grammar that are matters of opinion: there is no right answer or wrong answer; instead, two different, sometimes contradictory, solutions are possible. The use of a comma after a short introductory phrase is one of those: you don’t have to use one (or not use one); it’s up to you.
Season’s greetings. You are sending the greetings of the season (just one season), so it’s ’s. Don’t worry – after you’ve written something ten or twenty times, your mind starts doubting how to spell your own name, let alone remember the rules of the possessive apostrophe. And when organisations from government departments to educational institutions
Australians love to make a word shorter but occasionally this practice can lead to confusion. The case of the words migrant, emigrant and immigrant (or migration, emigration and immigration, or migrate, emigrate and immigrate) is perhaps the most conspicuous case of perfectly adequate and useful words being cut down to a version that loses the
Apposition: unless you’re a grammar trivia fiend, you’ve probably never heard of this word, and think it is a typo for opposition. But apposition is a real word and, apart from being a useful word to know for crosswords and Scrabble, it describes a particular way that words can be arranged in part of a
Using commas for parenthesis – or using parenthetical commas – is one of the most common uses for commas. Commas used in this way mark the start and end of a group of words that could be dropped out of a sentence without changing the basic meaning of the sentence. Commas are not the only
In celebration of the world’s greatest horseracing festival here in Melbourne – just over a kilometre, in fact, from where I sit right now – I am taking an equine theme this month for commonly confused words. There is a third homophone (or word that sounds the same) for this pair: rain. For some reason,