So, the most commonly made mistake in American English punctuation and grammar is using it’s for its and vice versa. It’s is not the possessive of it; rather, it’s is the contraction of it is or it has. Its is the possessive of it. Okay!
And now for the second most commonly made mistake in American English punctuation and grammar: In American English, commas and periods always go INSIDE quotation marks. There. Are. No. Exceptions.
The woods are full of people who don’t know this rule.
1) The beans are cooked in cast-iron at high heat, “pan-charred”, according to the Lee brothers, which renders them crunchy, toasty, and a little smoky.
2) His dislikes include hangnails, the phrase “YOLO”, really large malls, and Billy Corgan. [Please, never use the word “hangnails” in professional content.]
3) Can you command a technical conversation with the C-Suite? If your answer was, “yes”, let’s talk! [There are several things wrong with this sentence in addition to the comma being outside the quotation marks: it’s C-suite, not C-Suite, and there shouldn’t be a comma after was.]
4) Juliann combines an open and welcoming personality, contagious sense of humor and astute head for business that has propelled her to be consistently approached as an expert in personal and business branding and being the “CEO of YOU”. [Here’s another good example of multiple punctuation mistakes in a single sentence, from the website of an “expert.”]
5) Survival. The following sections shall survive the expiration or termination of this Agreement: ‘Revenue Share and Payment’, ‘Proprietary Rights’, ‘Confidentiality’, ‘Effects of Termination/Expiration’, ‘Indemnification’, ‘Disclaimers; Limitation of Liability’, ‘Non-Solicitation’ and ‘General’.
This last sentence, with its heightened importance because of all the scary legalese, is especially bad. Not only should quotation marks follow the commas in all items in this list (and follow the period after “General”) but double quotes (“”) should have been used, not single quotes (‘’). If you use double quotes and have to use quotes inside the double quotes, then you use single quotes, but you don’t come right out of the gate with single quotes.
Please tune back in for more punctuation and grammar information. This is interesting stuff!
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