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

Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?

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

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

Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.

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

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.