Punctuation

In English, there are three primary ways of forming plurals:

1. Adding s, as in dogs and cats.
2. Adding es, as in peaches.
3. Adding an apostrophe and s, used in forming the plurals of letters, as in t‘s.

Of course, there are some irregular words that do not comply with any of the above rules, such as goose and its plural geese, and moose and its plural moose.
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Note: Most people would probably agree that commas are the most confusing punctuation marks because there are so many rules dictating when and how they should be used. I will not attempt to list all the comma rules on this page (there are some excellent sites listed on the Resources page that explain all the rules of comma usage); instead–in keeping with the theme of this site–I will highlight a few of the errors that I’ve observed to be the most common.

I often receive e-mails that begin with the following greeting: “Hi Rachel.” Although this is certainly a friendly way to begin a letter, it violates one of the many comma rules: Always use a comma when directly addressing someone/something, regardless of whether the direct address is at the beginning or end of the sentence. If the direct address is in the middle of a sentence, use a pair of commas to set off the direct address.

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