Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. The little word “and,” we probably all know, is a conjunction. It connects things: “She is tall and thin” means she is ...

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) ...

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, ...

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 ...