Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, it seems, is a little obsessive about commas. According to press reports, he’s been sending out directives to staff that they should follow certain strict guidelines.

A student in my “History of the English Language” course stopped me after class a few weeks ago and asked, “I was just wondering—how do you feel about the Oxford comma?” She could have asked about the ...

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, ...