Grammar

it’s generally a safe bet to hyphenate the following: •Compound modifiers consisting of two or more adjectives that precede a noun and act as a single idea, like silly-looking monster (to differentiate from a jovial monster whose primary responsibility is to look).

A more important question is when you should link to a source. Doing so when citing any factual or quoted information that wasn’t delivered to you firsthand is generally a good idea: results of a study, an interview from another publication or story, statistics, additional examples, etc.

The birth of the modern emoticon, grandparent of the emoji, is widely accepted to be attributed to Scott E. Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor

“a colon means ‘that is to say’ or ‘here’s what I mean.’”

It’s standard for women to add an “a” to the end of their last name if they aren’t married or if they are commonly known as such

Traditionally, curly (or so-called “smart”) quotes have had a use distinct from straight (also called “regular” or the not-so-nice “dumb”) quotes. Pairs of the former are used to enclose quoted material—and they’re “smart” enough to know when to open a quote and when to close it, hence the moniker—while the latter should be reserved for, say, the s

the names of edible things that are derived from a proper noun (usually a geographic location, sometimes a person’s name)—especially when the item in question consists solely of the proper noun (e.g., Brie, as opposed to Brussels sprouts)—are typically capitalized.

Use italics for news websites and blogs (essentially anything that produces regular, dated content and is in other words analogous to a newspaper or magazine), and quotation marks for articles;

•Words that end in -es and are spelled the same as both the singular and plural form take only an apostrophe for the possessive of both forms (series’, species’