Punctuation-filter: When opening a sentence with the phrase, "Per my discussion with Mr. White __ I am writing you regarding..." What goes in the "__"? [more inside]
posted by wfrgms on Jun 5, 2009 - 24 answers

Semi-colon usage: "My name's John; I'm a carpenter and I enjoy repairing old homes and building new ones." [more inside]
posted by boosh on Mar 27, 2009 - 29 answers

Punctuation question. Gentle reader - what connotation do you get from seeing Jesus' or Jesus's OR Niklas' or Niklas's? (Possessives with or without the 's' for nouns ending in 's'.) [more inside]
posted by typewriter on Jan 23, 2009 - 43 answers

Looking for examples in literature where the author had to rely on his/her editor rather heavily. I'm thinking of instances where the authors were capable of spinning a good yarn, yet they had trouble with grammar, structure, punctuation, etc. [more inside]
posted by captainsohler on Dec 29, 2008 - 23 answers

Is 'Who knows' a question? [more inside]
posted by gummo on Oct 6, 2008 - 12 answers

Is this good use of punctuation? The adept poster: one of nobility, wisdom and wit, is the superior MeFite. [more inside]
posted by l33tpolicywonk on Sep 2, 2008 - 17 answers

Punctuation filter: How would I hyphenate "... climate change related disclosures", or "... climate change specific patterns"? [more inside]
posted by stenoboy on Aug 26, 2008 - 20 answers

MetaStyle: When using a superscripted dagger (cross) to indicate a footnote, should the footnote at the bottom of the page be preceded by a superscripted dagger or a regular-sized dagger? Should there be a space between the dagger and the footnote? [more inside]
posted by Shepherd on Jul 14, 2008 - 16 answers

Is there a consensus on the grammatical relationship between emoticons and punctuation? [more inside]
posted by mkultra on Apr 8, 2008 - 37 answers

What is the origin of using asterisks to bracket a self-referential action statement? [more inside]
posted by Tube on Dec 8, 2007 - 27 answers

How do you punctuate an elliptical sentence structure? 1) Paul ate the tuna casserole; Mary, the taco salad. OR 2) Paul ate the tuna casserole, Mary the taco salad. I'm feeling frustrated that I'm coming across many published examples that I find confusing to read!
posted by SMP on Sep 13, 2007 - 36 answers

My eight year old wrote her latest poem, then asked about the subtleties of poetic punctuation (commas, periods, breaks ... and why such decisions are made... help! ). The poem is included, as of course ... [more inside]
posted by RMD on Jun 5, 2007 - 32 answers

I would like to know about the peculiarities in eighteenth-century writing. [more inside]
posted by nasreddin on Apr 16, 2007 - 10 answers

What is the proper punctuation for this slogan? [more inside]
posted by nekton on Apr 13, 2007 - 19 answers

I find myself fascinated with the intricacies of typography, punctuation, character sets etc. What books should a newbie read to become a connoisseur on these matters? [more inside]
posted by lifeless on Apr 11, 2007 - 15 answers

Which heavy metal bands have umlauts in their names? Apart from Mötley Crüe and Motörhead, of course.
posted by tombola on Mar 30, 2007 - 21 answers

Anyone know anything at all about Adobe GoLive's use of -type HTML tags? Its insertion of these tags around dates, places, etc is causing extra spaces to pop up, throwing off proper punctuation and basically just making copytext look bad. [more inside]
posted by cyrusdogstar on Jan 9, 2007 - 4 answers

What has happened to people being able to properly use a single period to end a sentence? [more inside]
posted by The Bishop of Turkey on Dec 13, 2006 - 73 answers

In this article, a quotation reads "What is unique about Harry S Truman's name? His middle initial doesn't need a period after it". Why not?
posted by Heatwole on Nov 2, 2006 - 21 answers

I just realized (I'm fairly slow that way) that suddenly, and without fanfare, every language on Earth, excepting North-Korean and maybe a smattering of others, has acquired mood punctuation i.e. emoticons. Much like a ? indicates that the preceding sentence was a question, a jocular sentence is marked with a :)
Now, here comes my question. Are there any languages that have mood punctuation that pre-exists the internet? Or something similar? Markings that indicate a mood, feeling or emotion in any way? [more inside]
posted by Kattullus on Aug 4, 2006 - 21 answers

How do I end a sentence that's a list item? [more inside]
posted by pdb on Jun 14, 2006 - 20 answers

How do type an upside down question mark in Outlook Express? (for Spanish class)
posted by alball on Jan 28, 2005 - 15 answers

PunctuationFilter: I'm writing the copy for a CD insert booklet in which the title of a book is mentioned. Typically, I'd italicize it, but the entire piece is already in italics. What's the standard here?
posted by plexiwatt on Dec 6, 2004 - 18 answers

When (and where, and maybe why) did people start doing this ? Is it mostly a UK/Europe thing ? Is it only occasional or a valid trend now ?
(Another question about a grammar anomaly, but I'm not complaining this time, only curious. This one only occurs in informal [Internet] communication and for some reason I enjoy it: a space between sentence end and final punctuation, when punctuation is a '!' or '?' Mostly UK- and Ireland-ers do it, like sgt serenity [a mad Scotsman] here.)
posted by Shane on Mar 27, 2004 - 22 answers

People in my company often use a period instead of a question mark at the end of an interrogative sentence. I pointed this out to an old boss as I was proofing one of his e-mails, and he told me this is standard custom now in business communication. Is this so? What the hell? [more inside]
posted by Shane on Mar 25, 2004 - 44 answers

So, I want to type in Spanish [More] [more inside]
posted by Yelling At Nothing on Feb 4, 2004 - 4 answers

Why does Outlook convert an ellipsis (...) to a question mark (?) ? This is happening on outgoing emails -- I only can tell it's happening when people reply to me and I see the email I sent in the body of their reply. It does not appear in the saved copy on my machine. I use Word as my email text editor.
posted by bowline on Dec 10, 2003 - 4 answers