Category Archives: Punctuation

Usings Commas with Job Titles



Commas Job Title

One of the most common errors I see in business writing is the misuse of commas with names and titles. If you’re trying to figure out when to use commas with someone’s job title, just use these formulas to see three correct ways to express the same information.

[Name], the [job title] of [company name], [rest of sentence].

The [job title] of [company name], [name], [rest of sentence].

[Company name] [job title] [name] [rest of sentence].

Warren Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, plays the ukulele.

The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, plays the ukulele.

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett plays the ukulele.

Why do job titles sometimes need commas and sometimes not? It depends on whether the sentence contains restrictive or nonrestrictive elements (also called essential or nonessential elements).

The top two examples each contain a nonrestrictive clause between the two commas, meaning that it doesn’t restrict the meaning of the rest of the sentence. If you removed that clause, the sentence would still make sense.

Warren Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, plays the ukulele.

The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, plays the ukulele.

Warren Buffett plays the ukulele.

The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway plays the ukulele.

As my trusty reference guide Universal Keys for Writers explains,

“Commas signal that the extra, nonessential information they set off (useful and interesting as it may be) can be removed without radically altering or limiting the meaning of the independent clause. Think of paired commas as handles that can lift the enclosed information out of the sentence without making the sentence’s meaning confusing.”

But in the bottom example, Warren Buffett is a restrictive element, meaning that it restricts the meaning of the rest of the sentence. If you removed that information, you’d be left with an incomplete sentence.

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett plays the ukulele.

Berkshire Hathaway chairman plays the ukulele.

Universal Keys commands, “Do not use commas to set off restrictive information.”

Next time you’re writing a sentence containing a name and job title, follow these steps to figure out if you need commas or not:

  1. Use the formulas at the top of this guide.
  2. Put commas where you think they should go, and then try removing them. If the sentence still makes sense, you need the commas. If the sentence sounds wrong, you need to leave the commas out.
  3. If you’re still not sure, send me an email. I will happily tell you the answer.

For more fun with commas, check out 5 Surprising Places You Need a Comma and 3 Surprising Places You Don’t Need a Comma.


Photo credit: By TheYellowFellow (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Small Businessman? Small Business Man? Small-Business Man? How Do You Write This Term?



In my last post, I talked about compound words and inserting hyphens to clarify meaning, using the example of the novelty song “The Purple People Eater.” Although I spent a truly ridiculous amount of time researching that one, and I hope you will read and enjoy it, I do recognize that it’s unlikely to be directly applicable in your everyday writing. So I thought I would follow up on that idea with an example that gets used (and misused) frequently in business writing: what to call a man who runs a small business.

Many people incorrectly write this term as small businessman. It’s easy to see why this error is so common: a man who works in business is a businessman, one word. But businessman is actually a compound noun that lost its hyphen along the way. In its earliest days, going back to 1798, the term was written as business-man, with a hyphen, or business man, two words. It first got squished into one word in 1860, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and that spelling eventually became standard.

If you call someone a small businessman, you’re implying that he is a businessman who is small. While some men may technically fit into this category (e.g., the three-foot-six actor of Return of the Jedi and Harry Potter fame, who also owns a talent agency for actors under five feet tall, Willow Management), I doubt any of them prefer to identify as such.

Sure, he’s technically a small businessman but, more importantly, he’s a small-business man.

If you write the term as three separate words, small business man, you’re no longer actively suggesting that the man is small, but people may read it that way. It’s hard to tell what’s modifying what, and that results in confusion.

The proper way to write the term is small-business man. The compound adjective small-business modifies the noun man, implying a man who is involved in a small business.

The AP Stylebook uses this term as the example for using a hyphen to avoid ambiguity:

The president will speak to small-business men. (Businessmen normally is one word. But the president will speak to small businessmen is unclear.)

Next time you start to write this term, stop and remind yourself that what’s small is the business, not the man. And even if both are small, err on the side of modifying the business—the company wouldn’t feel belittled by being called small, but the man probably would.

What Is a Purple People Eater, Anyway?: Thoughts on Hyphenating Compound Words



Spoiler Alert: This post contains a mild spoiler for the Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. If you haven’t watched it yet, do, but in the meantime, scroll down and start reading the next section. It will still make sense, I promise.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

In episode 11 of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm) is on trial for kidnapping four women and keeping them in an underground bunker for fifteen years, claiming that the apocalypse had happened. Representing himself in the trial, he uses his folksy mannerisms, guitar playing, and Jon Hamm handsomeness to charm the jury, at one point telling them, “I’d like to play you folks a little song about another ‘craaaaazy’ preacher you might’a heard of. His name was Jesus.” And then he launches into the classic novelty song “The Purple People Eater.”

He was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater
One-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater
One-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater
Sure looks strange to me

After I recovered from cracking up at this beautifully executed joke, I wondered, Wait, what the hell is a purple people eater? As it turns out, there’s some controversy about this question because the song’s title lacks clarifying punctuation.


The Confusion

“The Purple People Eater,” written and performed by Sheb Wooley, was the song of the summer in 1958—it for six weeks. It tells a very silly story about an alien who comes to earth because he wants to be a rock star and possibly also eat people. From the beginning, people were confused about the meaning of the song. What was purple: the alien or the people?

When multiple adjectives are piled in front of a noun (called , , or in writing guides), the relationship between the words in the phrase can become confusing. Inserting hyphens prevents misreading.

Floor-length gown
Four-year-old child
Blue-collar jobs

Similarly, when two or more words are put together to make one noun, adding a hyphen can clarify that the words are one item (called a ).

Father-in-law
Well-being
Get-together

If the title had been “The PurplePeople Eater,” the song would clearly be about an alien who eats purple people (a compound adjective modifying a noun). If it had been called “The Purple PeopleEater,” it would clearly be about a purple alien who eats people (an adjective modifying a compound noun). But the song’s title, “The Purple People Eater,” doesn’t use a hyphen, so it can be interpreted either way.


Possibility 1: The Alien Is Purple

I had always assumed, based on the cover of the LP that I had as a youngster, that the one-eyed, one-horned alien was purple.

Most people interpret the song this way. In fact, a low-budget movie based on the song was made in 1988. It starred a young Neil Patrick Harris, along with Ned Beatty, Shelley Winters, Thora Burch, Chubby Checker, Little Richard, and a very purple alien.

You can , but I should warn you that San Francisco Chronicle critic Peter Stack called it “a new low in children’s films.”*


Possibility 2: The People Are Purple

Why do some listeners disagree with the idea that the alien is purple? Because of this lyric:

I said Mr. Purple People Eater, what’s your line
He said it’s eatin’ purple people and it sure is fine
But that’s not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a rock and roll band

Oldies expert Dusty Rhodes told the column , “It would seem as though the color refers to the people being ingested more than the monster.”

written at the height the song’s popularity declares, “Disk jockeys all over the country have invited their listeners to draw the Purple People Eater (both the jockeys and listeners seemed to miss the fine point that the People Eater is not really purple but merely an eater of purple people).”

That summer, LIFE magazine created a spread featuring some of these drawings, and a photograph in the middle shows Sheb Wooley with a people eater puppet that his wife made. But the photo is in black and white, so we can’t be 100 percent sure that the puppet is purple.


The Answer

I dug through a bunch of archives to get to the bottom of this question. It turns out the song was inspired by a joke another songwriter, Don Robertson, heard from his kids and told to Sheb Wooley.

“What has one eye, one horn, flies, and eats people?”
“A one-eyed, one-horned flying people-eater.”

Wooley decided there was song potential in it. He let it marinate for a few days until “the purple people eater landed in Sheb’s patio. When he saw that part of the riddle was missing—he hadn’t known before that the one-eyed, one-horned fellow was purple—the song was as good as finished,” explains a 1958 Tucson Daily Citizenprofile of Wooley. “I could see him sitting on the lawn,” Wooley recalls, “one eye, one horn, and all purple.”**

That same year, a United Press International article quotes Wooley as saying, “I just gave him a color—purple.”***

In 1988, he told the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) that he “added the purple part ‘for color.’”**** The interview was occasioned by the release of the movie, in which, it turns out, Sheb Wooley has a small part. (In addition to being a songwriter, Wooley was an actor who mostly appeared in Westerns, including Rawhide and High Noon.)

It would seem, then, that the songwriter intended the one-eyed, one-horned flying people eater to be purple. I couldn’t find any interviews with Wooley that directly address the line about eatin’ purple people, but I like to imagine that he wrote that lyric to add to the song’s overall zaniness.

“I think we need humor in music,” Wooley explains to the NEA. “I think we need more humor in the world, period. It’s a healing ointment.” If Wooley were still alive, I think he’d be pleased to see what Kimmy Schmidt has done with his song.


* Stack, Peter. “‘Purple People Eater’: Nothing to Sing About.” San Francisco Chronicle 19 Dec. 1988. Web [NewsBank database]. 27 Apr. 2015.

** Campbell, Bob. “The Living End Is Reached.” Tucson Daily Citizen 28 June 1958. Web [Newspaper ARCHIVE Library Edition]. 27 Apr. 2015.

*** United Press International. “Purple People Eater Rates No. 1 on Everybody’s List.” Independent Press-Telegram 15 June 1958. Web [Newspaper ARCHIVE Library Edition]. 27 Apr. 2015.

**** Newspaper Enterprise Association. Vare, Ethelie Ann. “Video Update.” The Frederick Post 16 Dec. 1988. Web [Newspaper ARCHIVE Library Edition]. 27 Apr. 2015.

3 Places You Can Use a Comma, or Not




Note: this is part three of a three-part series on comma use. Be sure to check out these posts as well:

5 Surprising Places You Need a Comma

3 Surprising Places You Don’t Need a Comma

My last two blog posts on commas were all about the official rules of where you do or do not place a comma. But not all comma rules are written in stone; this time, let’s take a look at the situations in which comma use is entirely up to you.

1. Before the last item in a series. When you’re listing three or more items, you can choose whether or not to use a comma before the final item in the series:

Red, white, and blue or red, white and blue

Word nerds often have very passionate opinions about this comma, which is called the serial comma or Oxford comma. For example, you can buy this t-shirt—

—even though Thomas Jefferson did not use a serial comma when he wrote about “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”:

People who use the AP Stylebook argue that the serial comma is not necessary because the and signals that the last item of the series is coming up. People who follow The Chicago Manual of Style or the MLA Style Manual say that it is necessary, pointing out that omitting the final comma can result in comical misreading:

And then non-serial-comma-users will point out that the sentence could easily be rearranged so it doesn’t imply that Washington and Lincoln were rhinoceri. The argument goes on forever.

As I always say about matters of style, the most important thing is consistency. Either always use an Oxford comma or never use one.

2. After a brief introductory word or phrase. If you have just a word or a few words introducing your sentence, you can choose whether or not to use a comma before the rest of the sentence.

On a whim, we decided to spend the weekend in Vegas.
In retrospect, it would have been easier to take a taxi.
Later, we’ll look back on this and laugh.

or

On a whim we decided to spend the weekend in Vegas.
In retrospect it would have been easier to take a taxi.
Later we’ll look back on this and laugh.

You get to decide when you want to use a comma with short introductory phrases. But if you are going to leave out the comma, make sure that doing so won’t cause misreading.

X Before eating the family always said grace.
Before eating, the family always said grace.

With a longer introductory phrase, you should always use a comma to prevent confusion.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure that I ever have seen a baby squirrel.
And on top of everything else, I came down with the flu.

There’s no real consensus about the exact number of words an introductory phrase needs to have before it requires a comma; most websites recommend somewhere between three and five, but none of the major style guides addresses it directly. I always use a comma after four words, but I picked that number arbitrarily. You can set your own rule.

3. With the word too. When using too to mean in addition, you can just put it in the sentence, or you can set it off with a comma (or a pair of commas if it’s mid-sentence).

I, too, wish summer could last forever.
“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.”

or

I too wish summer could last forever.
“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too.”

Using a comma with too creates a pause around the word, giving it more emphasis. Read your sentence aloud, and if you naturally pause at too, add a comma (or commas). If it flows as part of the sentence, leave it be.

I hope this series on comma use has helped clarify when you should or should not use a comma, and when you can choose for yourself. If you have any questions about commas, please ; as these posts prove, I’m always happy to talk about comma use.

OK, Let’s Talk About How to Spell “Okay,” O.K.?



O.K., you know what’s weird? OK is one of the most commonly used words in English (—which is pretty darn high when you realize that ). But there’s no definitive way to spell okay! Why is it that we don’t know how to spell a word that we use every day? Because it started as an abbreviation and has become a full word over time.

The word dates back to 1839, when there was a fad in New York and Boston slang to misspell a saying and then abbreviate it. , an excellent guide to etymology, lists a few others that didn’t stand the test of time:

  • K.G. for no go, as if spelled know go
  • N.C. for ’nuff ced
  • K.Y. for know yuse

O.K. is an abbreviation for oll korrect. It probably would have disappeared along with the other abbreviations if not for the 1840 presidential election. Martin Van Buren was nicknamed Old Kinderhook (after the village in upstate New York where he was born), and his supporters formed the O.K. Club.

You can buy this 1840 wood-block engraving showing the origin of O.K. for just $2,295 on eBay.

The first instance of spelling out okay was in 1895, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but this spelling wasn’t popularized until the 1930s; President Woodrow Wilson (who served from 1913 to 1921) apparently approved government papers by writing okeh.

But over the second half of the twentieth century, the new spelling really took off. shows the skyrocketing popularity of okay over O.K. and OK in published books.

Does this mean you should use okay? Not necessarily. The major style guides actually lean toward OK.

The AP Stylebook—favored by newspapers—puts it succinctly: “OK, OK’d, OK’ing, OKs. Do not use okay.”

The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing—the guide for academic writing—doesn’t directly address the question, but it recommends turning to a reliable dictionary such as Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary for spelling questions and notes, “Where entries show variant spellings, use the form given first.” Webster’s lists OK first, so that is the preferred spelling for academic work.

The Chicago Manual of Style—used by book publishers—is silent on the issue, too, but in a Q&A on the website, the editors responded:

CMOS doesn’t specify, but as it happens, the manual uses ‘OK’ twice … and does not use ‘okay’ at all. … We follow Webster’s 11th Collegiate, which puts ‘OK’ as the first spelling—but that does not mean it is preferred. Rather, ‘okay’ is an equal variant (also standard).”

If you like periods with your abbreviations, it’s not incorrect to use them in this case, but it is a bit outdated. At this point, the only major publications that favor O.K. with periods are and .

So how should you spell it? If you’re not bound to a particular style guide, choose whichever spelling you like best. As always with questions of style, though, pick one and be consistent.

Let’s Make a Dash for It: The Different Dashes and When to Use Them



You have probably noticed that there are a few different kinds of dashes, but you may not know what they’re called and when they’re called for. Well, don’t despair—just follow this guide, and soon you’ll be deftly dashing off dashes.

I consulted The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing and combined their advice to create this list of the most common usages of each dash. Using the AP Stylebook? Follow this asterisk.*

I may have omitted or glossed over a few of the less common usages, so if you think of an example that isn’t covered here, please leave it in the comments.

Hyphen

What it looks like:

How to type it: Type the button between the 0 and the +/= on your keyboard.

When to use it: The smallest dash, the hyphen, is commonly used to join words.

  • To connect compound words, compound phrases, and some prefixes

Reno doesn’t have world-class casinos like Las Vegas does.
He’s part of the do-anything-as-long-as-it-feels-good generation.
Sophia lived in a co-op during college.

  • To join coequal nouns

Actor-director Rob Reiner had his first onscreen role in ten years in The Wolf of Wall Street.

  • To separate groups of numbers

Call 1-800-555-1212.

  • To spell out a word

Sophia spells her name s-o-p-h-i-a.

  • To break up a long word at the end of a line (n.b., while this is common practice in books, it is rarely used online).

En Dash

What it looks like:

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type a space, then a hyphen, then another space. The program will automatically convert the hyphen to an en dash. If you like keyboard shortcuts, use Ctrl + Alt + Hyphen on Windows or Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or just copy and paste it from this post.

When to use it: The en dash, so named because it’s the width of an n, is usually used to separate numbers.

  • To mean up to and including

We’re almost at the end of the 2013–14 school year.
See pages 45–49 for more details.

  • To mean to

We took the New York–London redeye flight.
The Red Sox won the 2013 World Series by pummeling the Cardinals 6–1 in the sixth game.

  • With an unfinished range of numbers

Dianne Feinstein (1933–) is the oldest member of the Senate.

  • To replace a hyphen in a compound-adjective phrase when the compound is open or consists of two hyphenated phrases.

Is the post–Cold War stability unraveling?
The first-quarter–second-quarter comparison shows steady growth.

Don’t worry too much about this last one. As The Chicago Manual of Style puts it, “This editorial nicety may go unnoticed by the majority of readers; nonetheless, it is intended to signal a more comprehensive link than a hyphen would. It should be used sparingly, and only when a more elegant solution is unavailable.”

Em Dash

What it looks like:

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type two hyphens immediately following a word and then start the next word (no spaces). The program will automatically convert the hyphens to an em dash. Or hold down Ctrl + Alt + Minus (on the numeric keyboard) on Windows or Shift + Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or copy and paste it from above.

When to use it: The em dash, which is the width of an m, is used to create an aside or to separate and draw attention to part of a sentence.

  • Instead of parentheses

And the craziest part of it (and I swear this is true) was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

And the craziest part of it—and I swear this is true—was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

  • Instead of a comma

People at the party were already dancing on the table, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

People at the party were already dancing on the table—and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

  • Instead of a colon

You only ever think about one thing: money.

You only ever think about one thing—money.

  • To introduce a pronoun that summarizes a preceding noun or series of nouns

God, country, family—these were the things he valued most.

  • To show a break in thought or dialogue

“Are you—wait a minute—you’re saying that you know who the murderer was?”

  • In front of explanatory expressions such as “that is” or “namely” or “for example.”

I keep my apartment clean—that is, when I have the time.

If you’re using an email service or a program that doesn’t easily allow special characters, use two hyphens instead of an em dash:

Latest update about the merger–it was just approved by the board.

*Writing for a newspaper? Good news! You only need one kind of dash. The hyphen—which the AP Stylebook simply calls a dash—is used for everything.

Instead of an en dash, just use one dash, no spaces:

We’re almost at the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Instead of an em dash, insert a space, a dash, and another space:

And the craziest part of it – and I swear this is true – was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

If you use AP style regularly, you might want to turn of autocorrect for dashes, or Word will automatically turn the Space-Dash-Space combo into an en dash.

I hope this post helps you understand the rules about dashes. Have a question about using a dash in a particular sentence? Leave it in the comments or —I’ll be happy to offer advice.

Let’s Make a Dash for It: The Different Dashes and When to Use Them



You have probably noticed that there are a few different kinds of dashes, but you may not know what they’re called and when they’re called for. Well, don’t despair—just follow this guide, and soon you’ll be deftly dashing off dashes.

I consulted The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing and combined their advice to create this list of the most common usages of each dash. Using the AP Stylebook? Follow this asterisk.*

I may have omitted or glossed over a few of the less common usages, so if you think of an example that isn’t covered here, please leave it in the comments.

Hyphen

What it looks like:

How to type it: Type the button between the 0 and the +/= on your keyboard.

When to use it: The smallest dash, the hyphen, is commonly used to join words.

  • To connect compound words, compound phrases, and some prefixes

Reno doesn’t have world-class casinos like Las Vegas does.
He’s part of the do-anything-as-long-as-it-feels-good generation.
Sophia lived in a co-op during college.

  • To join coequal nouns

Actor-director Rob Reiner had his first onscreen role in ten years in The Wolf of Wall Street.

  • To separate groups of numbers

Call 1-800-555-1212.

  • To spell out a word

Sophia spells her name s-o-p-h-i-a.

  • To break up a long word at the end of a line (n.b., while this is common practice in books, it is rarely used online).

En Dash

What it looks like:

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type a space, then a hyphen, then another space. The program will automatically convert the hyphen to an en dash. If you like keyboard shortcuts, use Ctrl + Alt + Hyphen on Windows or Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or just copy and paste it from this post.

When to use it: The en dash, so named because it’s the width of an n, is usually used to separate numbers.

  • To mean up to and including

We’re almost at the end of the 2013–14 school year.
See pages 45–49 for more details.

  • To mean to

We took the New York–London redeye flight.
The Red Sox won the 2013 World Series by pummeling the Cardinals 6–1 in the sixth game.

  • With an unfinished range of numbers

Dianne Feinstein (1933–) is the oldest member of the Senate.

  • To replace a hyphen in a compound-adjective phrase when the compound is open or consists of two hyphenated phrases.

Is the post–Cold War stability unraveling?
The first-quarter–second-quarter comparison shows steady growth.

Don’t worry too much about this last one. As The Chicago Manual of Style puts it, “This editorial nicety may go unnoticed by the majority of readers; nonetheless, it is intended to signal a more comprehensive link than a hyphen would. It should be used sparingly, and only when a more elegant solution is unavailable.”

Em Dash

What it looks like:

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type two hyphens immediately following a word and then start the next word (no spaces). The program will automatically convert the hyphens to an em dash. Or hold down Ctrl + Alt + Minus (on the numeric keyboard) on Windows or Shift + Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or copy and paste it from above.

When to use it: The em dash, which is the width of an m, is used to create an aside or to separate and draw attention to part of a sentence.

  • Instead of parentheses

And the craziest part of it (and I swear this is true) was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

And the craziest part of it—and I swear this is true—was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

  • Instead of a comma

People at the party were already dancing on the table, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

People at the party were already dancing on the table—and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

  • Instead of a colon

You only ever think about one thing: money.

You only ever think about one thing—money.

  • To introduce a pronoun that summarizes a preceding noun or series of nouns

God, country, family—these were the things he valued most.

  • To show a break in thought or dialogue

“Are you—wait a minute—you’re saying that you know who the murderer was?”

  • In front of explanatory expressions such as “that is” or “namely” or “for example.”

I keep my apartment clean—that is, when I have the time.

If you’re using an email service or a program that doesn’t easily allow special characters, use two hyphens instead of an em dash:

Latest update about the merger–it was just approved by the board.

*Writing for a newspaper? Good news! You only need one kind of dash. The hyphen—which the AP Stylebook simply calls a dash—is used for everything.

Instead of an en dash, just use one dash, no spaces:

We’re almost at the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Instead of an em dash, insert a space, a dash, and another space:

And the craziest part of it – and I swear this is true – was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

If you use AP style regularly, you might want to turn of autocorrect for dashes, or Word will automatically turn the Space-Dash-Space combo into an en dash.

I hope this post helps you understand the rules about dashes. Have a question about using a dash in a particular sentence? Leave it in the comments or —I’ll be happy to offer advice.

3 Surprising Places You Don’t Need a Comma



Get excited: This is the long-awaited follow-up to my post explaining the five surprising places you need a comma. Just as people tend to leave out commas when they should put them in, people tend to insert commas when they should leave them out. Here are three surprising places commas don’t belong:

1. Between a person’s title and name (when the title comes first). When you write someone’s title before the person’s name, you don’t need to use a comma in between:

UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks took office in 2013.
Facebook COO Cheryl Sandburg is a bestselling author.

When the title precedes the name, it functions as an adjective describing the person, and there’s no reason to separate adjectives from the nouns they describe.

Do note, though, that when the title follows the name, it is set off by commas. (See #2 on the list of places you need a comma).

Nicholas B. Dirks, the UC Berkeley Chancellor, took office in 2013.
Cheryl Sandburg, the COO of Facebook, is a bestselling author.

2. From something to something to something. A common way to group a list of items is to start the sentence with from and separate the items with to. Many people use serial commas to separate these items, but there’s no need; each to does its own separating.

I love all berries from strawberries to blackberries to huckleberries.
From boots to bicycles to broccoli, that store sells everything.

3. Between an independent clause and a dependent clause. This one is a bit tricky for people who are not naturally inclined to identify parts of a sentence, but I’ll try to make it make sense.

An independent clause has a subject and a predicate, and it can stand on its own as a sentence:

You should wear a jacket.

A dependent clause modifies an independent clause, and it can’t stand on its own:

Because it’s cold outside.

If you put the dependent clause first, you use a comma to separate the clauses:

Because it’s cold outside, you should wear a jacket.

However, if you put the independent clause first, you don’t need a comma between the clauses:

You should wear a jacket because it’s cold outside.

I hope this post helped you identify some places you may be inserting commas unnecessarily. And don’t miss part three of this series: places you can use a comma, or not.

Presidents Day? President’s Day? Presidents’ Day? How Do You Spell the Upcoming Holiday?



We’re all counting down to the upcoming three-day weekend, but many of us don’t know how to write the name of the holiday on Monday correctly. Is it Presidents Day? How about President’s Day? Presidents’ Day? Well, it all depends on whom you ask.

Most dictionaries and The Chicago Manual of Style favor Presidents’ Day. The apostrophe at the end of the word indicates a plural possessive: It’s a day that belongs to multiple presidents. But the AP Stylebook—perhaps taking its cue from Veterans Day—favors Presidents Day, as in a day of more than one president. You could maybe make an argument for President’s Day, but no official reference book will back you up on that. Why are there two “correct” ways to spell the holiday? Believe it or not, Presidents’ Day (which, as a Chicago Manual enthusiast, I will choose to spell with an apostrophe at the end) is not an official holiday.

The federal holiday is called Washington’s Birthday; the term Presidents’ Day was popularized by marketers seizing on an occasion for a sale. The presidents it refers to are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who both had birthdays in February.

Washington was born on either February 11, 1731, or February 22, 1732, depending on whether you use the Julian calendar or the Gregorian calendar (both were in use at the time; we use the Gregorian calendar now). Many states started celebrating his birthday on February 22, 1832, in honor of the centennial of his birth. It was made a federal holiday in 1879.

Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Since 1922, it’s been a tradition to lay a ceremonial wreath at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial on his birthday, and many states celebrate it as an official holiday. But it has never been a federal holiday.

The Uniform Monday Holiday Act, enacted in 1971, moved several holidays to designated Mondays to give citizens fixed three-day weekends. Washington’s Birthday was moved to the third Monday in February, ironically ensuring that it would never fall on his actual birthday. Since it was now within a week or so of Lincoln’s birthday, many businesses squashed the holidays together. And that’s why we’ll be enjoying Presidents’ Day, plural possessive, or Presidents Day, with no apostrophe, on Monday.

This Punctuation Mark Is Not a Backslash: /



Grammar quiz time! Say the following URL out loud, as if you were giving it out over the phone: www.google.com/analytics.

Did you just say “double-u double-u double-u dot google dot com backslash analytics”? The good news is that you’re not alone; lots of people would say the same thing. The bad news is that you made an error: The punctuation mark / is not a backslash.

When it tilts to the right, / is just called a slash. In British English, it’s called a stroke. In English that nobody except the dictionary uses, it’s called a solidus or a virgule. If you want to clearly distinguish the mark from a backslash, you can call it a forward slash, but you don’t generally need to say the forward part.

The slash has a lot of uses: showing alternatives (he/she), writing fractions (1/3), expressing a two-year span (the 1997/98 fiscal year), writing dates (1/20/2013), abbreviating per (80 miles/hour), expressing a line break in quoted poetry (“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky”), and—of course—to separate the domain from the path in a URL (www.npr.org/blogs/money/).

The backslash was invented for and is only used in programming language, so unless you’re a programmer, you probably won’t run into it very often. It is used for different purposes in different coding languages, but it usually indicates that whatever follows the backslash should be treated differently than what came before it.

The really good news is that this is one of the easiest punctuation rules to memorize: A backslash points backward (\) and a [forward] slash points forward (/). Remember this next time you’re giving out a URL, and you’ll be sure to say it right.