Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. There’s no denying that commas are helpful little flecks of punctuation. They allow us to separate ...

Iran, North Korea, Syria and ... commas. While Mike Pompeo is focused on a number of key geopolitical concerns, an email obtained by CNN suggests that the secretary of state also appears to have had ...

Use a comma to separate two independent clauses when they are joined by one of seven coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so). We were out of ice cream, so I went to the store. (c) ...

This week’s episode is all about another facet of comma usage: How do you know whether to set something off in commas? Are the added words essential (restrictive ...