Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with June Casagrante, a language columnist for the Los Angeles Times, author of five books about language, including one of my favorite reference books, the best punctuation book, period.

June, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Hi, Minian.

Thanks for having me.

You bet.

There is a line in your introduction that I want to read to you because I think it's so

great and it raises a question for me.

So it says, a lot of people assume there's a single correct answer for every punctuation

conundrum. Either the comma

belongs in a certain place or it doesn't. The good news here is also the bad news. Often,

there's more than one right answer. And I want to know why you would ever say that's good news.

Because it means you don't have to be exactly right every time. It releases a lot of people, as you know well, have a lot of anxiety about grammar and punctuation and there's a right way to do this. And though this is the thing I want to do, I'm not sure it's the single right way. And not only is there a good chance that it is the right way,

but your instinct with language is often really, it's often better than you think. So if you're

torn between finding out an absolute positive definitive, there's only one way to do this

correct answer, or just saying, I've been a speaker of this language for a number of

years. I've been reading in it in a number of years, and my educated gut tells me do this.

It's good news that your educated guts right nine times out of ten.

Do you find that punctuation, to me it feels like it's a little more susceptible to there being styles than hard and fast rules, but there is more of this.

Well, it could be this way or it could be that way.

Do you find that true as well?

I think it's a lot more prone to hard and fast rules than the language at large because punctuation started as rules.

Language started extremely organically.

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