Liz in Newport Beach, Calif., posed a good question about commas. Consider the following two sentences. "Days are usually great, but, when they aren't great, they still pass in 24 hours." "Every word ...

If you’re looking for a grammatical convention guaranteed to spark an unnecessarily outraged debate, look no further than the Oxford comma [Editor’s note: I don’t know that I’d call it unnecessary].

Comma mistakes happen all the time, but serious comma mistakes — errors that change your meaning or mislead your reader — are rare. It seems like every day I see a comma placed after a quotation mark, ...