When Page Numbers Don’t Help

Editors are never happy. First they throw a fit if you send in a manuscript without page numbers, but once you send them a paginated work, they complain when you try to discuss a sentence on page 67.

Oxford, Chicago, and the Serial Comma

Its generic name is the serial (or series) comma, but a lot of people refer to it by a fancier name: Oxford comma.

Numbers in Creative Writing

When we think about writing numbers, we tend to think of research papers, financial reports, sports columns, and other quantity-laden nonfiction settings. But novelists and playwrights and poets also puzzle over how to style numbers.

Chicago Style Workout 41: Prefixes

This month’s Chicago style workout focuses on the fourth and last section of our hyphenation table, “Words Formed with Prefixes.”

Semicolons in Fiction

Anyone who learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard would be excused for thinking the semicolon is the most important mark of punctuation in English; why else would it be sitting right there on the home row?

“Ain’t Misbehavin’ ”: When Quotation Marks and Apostrophes Collide

In 1929, when the song “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” became a big hit, composers Thomas “Fats” Waller and Harry Brooks probably weren’t too worried about that final apostrophe.