Jimmy Kimmel lightly mocked Mike Pence’s latest scandal on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” joking that the controversy over a single comma in his memoirs doesn’t make sense. “He’s more of a colon guy.

You’ve probably seen these two little dots, one on top of the other, scattered throughout your reading material. But do you really know what they’re used for? The colon is not something that shows up ...

For writers at work, punctuation can slip from a matter of convention to one of obsession. I just finished my poetry thesis last week, and I’m embarrassed to admit the number of times I changed ...

Reading good prose should be like listening to a well-constructed piece of music: it should have rhythm; it should have cadences; in short, it should have style. In that sentence I have used the four ...

Are you a dashaholic? It’s a thing, apparently. I’m more of a colon abuser myself: as if everything I write is so important it requires the colon’s drumroll effect. I’ve known more than a few comma ...

Feelings about the semicolon run strong. Its proper use is a hallmark of literacy. and today we're going to talk about the semicolon. It's the hot new piece of punctuation. Everyone is using it. The ...

If you use the wrong one, you can always claim it was a typo. | Dominique James/iStock via Getty Images Plus Despite what its name suggests, a semicolon isn’t exactly just half a colon—it has its own ...

Colons are one of the most misunderstood punctuation marks. Many people think they are only used to introduce lists, but they can be used for much more. For example, colons can introduce quotations, ...

I’ve talked about colons more than once in this column, but my focus is usually limited in scope. I zoom in on the little questions, like how many spaces to put after a colon and whether it should be ...