One of our readers asks, “How many exclamation marks are too many? What is the standard usage on number of exclamation marks in a sentence or on a page?”

This sounds like a question born in the era of OMG!!!!!1!!1eleventy!, but questions around overuse of exclamation marks-or exclamation points in American English-have been around for much longer ( Read more... )

While I can't say that I've encountered such inflammatory disagreements here at fandom_grammar, we grammarians certainly have our disagreements, don't we?


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Our next question comes from lacygrey:

What is the proper comma use with "therefore"?

( An excellent question! Let’s take a look under the cut.... )

mirankos wants to know "How do you write out the plural of an alphabetic letter?" That is an excellent question! The answer is bad news or good news, depending upon whether you prefer your grammar prescriptive (with hard and fast rules) or not.

( Let's take a look at how plural letters can be written, with some examples from Harry Potter. )

starwatcher307 asked us "How do you punctuate with abbreviations?"

One of the first things to get out of the way on this issue is whether you want to use periods (British usage: full stops) in your abbreviations. For a discussion about how to decide whether to use periods in an abbreviation, see our earlier article.

If the abbreviation in ( Read more... )

tejas asks: Should the sentence "Are you really sure you want to do that or would you rather live another day" end with with a period or a question mark?

Punctuation marks are cues to the reader as to how the text should sound. Commas indicate pauses, exclamation points indicate loudness or excitement, and question marks indicate the rise or fall of ( Read more... )

Is it just a fanfic thing to drop the periods in the abbreviations or has it become “acceptable” outside of fanfic as well? (ex. NCIS vs. N.C.I.S., SGC vs. S.G.C.)

While fanfic has been around for a long time, so have dropped periods in abbreviations. In fact, if you go to the Official NCIS website, you'll notice even the United States government ( Read more... )