Periods | The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation

Ellipsis Four-Dot Method

GrammarBook.com — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 11:00:20 +0000

You may have seen three dots within text when reading a sentence (…). This punctuation mark is called an ellipsis. An ellipsis represents an omission of one or more words within a quoted passage. The plural of ellipsis is ellipses. The ellipsis serves efficient writing by allowing us to abbreviate content or otherwise include only […]

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Punctuation for Abbreviations

GrammarBook.com — Wed, 05 May 2021 11:00:35 +0000

Those who write in American English may sometimes wonder when to abbreviate a word as well as how to abbreviate it. This review will help address those questions. An abbreviation is a shortened or contracted form of a word or a phrase (e.g., Mister to Mr.). If you’re ever in doubt about when and how […]

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A Study of Style: The U.S. Military

GrammarBook.com — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 05:00:30 +0000

Our exploration of American English strives to venture even further than the principles that guide writing with precision and eloquence. We are also interested in the language variances beyond what we accept as common for information exchange. For example, we know that United States can be abbreviated, often as either US or U.S. One might […]

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A Midsummer’s Musing on Miscellany

GrammarBook.com — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 05:00:49 +0000

Our regular readers might note that our study of American English periodically includes smaller but still noteworthy items we collect from research and reader correspondence. It’s been several months since our last musings on miscellany, so we thought we’d return for more as we approach midsummer 2020. (To review miscellany from the past two years, […]

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Sabotage in Broad Daylight?

GrammarBook.com — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 12:00:09 +0000

If you like being punched in the gut, type the word literally into Google, everyone’s favorite internet search engine. Here is what you’ll find: 1. in a literal manner or sense; exactly. “the driver took it literally when asked to go straight across the traffic circle” 2. INFORMAL used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while […]

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Rules Do Change

GrammarBook.com — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 05:00:05 +0000

Spacing after periods, colons, question marks, and exclamation marks Originally, typewriters had monospaced fonts (skinny letters and fat letters took up the same amount of space), so two spaces after ending punctuation marks such as the period were used to make the text more legible. However, most computer fonts present no difficulty with proportion or […]

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Comma Chameleon

GrammarBook.com — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 17:28:18 +0000

I realize that on the grand scale of interesting things, punctuation is pretty far down the list. (In a recent survey, it was in a dead heat with stovepipes, just behind pocket lint.) Punctuation is a dying art. I’m not sure whether this is the writers’ or the readers’ fault, but I mostly blame the […]

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Punctuation or Chaos

GrammarBook.com — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 15:43:43 +0000

She said I saved the company No one knows for sure what the above sentence means. It consists of six everyday words, and the first five are monosyllables, yet this simple declarative sentence has at least three quite different meanings—maybe more, because with no period on the end, the reader can’t even be sure the […]

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All About etc.

GrammarBook.com — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 19:53:32 +0000

The abbreviation etc. is from the Latin et cetera, which means “and other things.” It appears at the end of a list when there is no point in giving more examples. Writers use it to say, “And so on” or “I could go on” or “You get the idea.” In American English, etc. ends in a period, even midsentence. […]

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Essential and Nonessential Elements, Part II

GrammarBook.com — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 19:04:20 +0000

Here is the rule again, in case you missed it: Essential elements in a sentence should not be enclosed in commas. Nonessential elements in a sentence should be enclosed by commas. Last time, we applied the rule to clauses. Today we’ll look at essential and nonessential phrases (a phrase is two or more related words […]

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