One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience.

The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.

Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.

The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around.

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

Many survivors refuse to talk about what they went through but I've never been ashamed to have been in one of those places. The shame is not mine; the church should be ashamed. They say now they're sorry - what they mean is, sorry they were found out.