And you don't have to be a grammar professional to have an ... and more for those of you unfamiliar with the Oxford comma rule, including examples for each. Related: What Exactly Is the Difference ...

A few less-common yet well-placed punctuation marks can give your application essay a sophisticated edge. For example, consider adding a semicolon to connect two closely related sentences ...

When combining two complete sentences with a conjunction ("and," "but," "or," "for," or "yet"), precede the conjunction with a comma. Example: Still, the sun is slowly getting brighter and hotter, and ...

Use and between the last two items, instead of a comma. For example: Today I need to buy milk, bread, apples and potatoes. In longer sentences, you can use commas to separate out extra information ...

“Interestingly, low scoring essays showed the highest level of complexity in finite adverbial dependent clauses,” Yasuda ...

Grammarians disagree over whether a comma should be placed before the conjunction in a series (the underlined comma in example 2 below is a “serial comma”). However, confusion can be avoided by adding ...

Soon, they were joined by Miranda Schwartz, a copy editor who was wearing a shirt that read “I’M SILENTLY CORRECTING YOUR GRAMMAR” — notably, the message lacked a punctuation mark at the end.