Unhand that comma!
Do semicolons fill you with rage? Does a perfectly placed hyphen warm your heart? Even in an age dominated by the 140-character tweet, the emoji, and the ubiquitous Internet acronym, proper punctuation remains a going obsession. With National Punctuation Day set for Sunday, the Gazette sought the judgment of two campus wordsmiths: Jill Abramson, senior lecturer on journalism and former executive editor of The New York Times, and Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and author of “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.” GAZETTE: What type of punctuation gives you the most pleasure? ABRAMSON: My favorite is the period. It prevents run-on sentences. It makes you think coherently and express yourself succinctly. It drove me crazy as the editor of The New York Times when the first paragraph of a story was one long sentence with lots of clauses separated by commas. The...