The best stories about writing this week

A piece from The Wall Street Journal this week suggests some punctuation may be hurried out of regular use by the relaxed style of blogs, tweets, comments, and Facebook posts.

Also in this edition of the Week in Writing, Twitter and regional slang, a classic piece of journalism, Walter Isaacson on writing about Steve Jobs, and more.

Is This The Future of Punctuation? More evidence that copy editors might soon be an endangered species. In The Wall Street Journal, Henry Hitchings takes a surprisingly quick 500-year trip through English punctuation with stops at such obscure marks as the pilcrow, the hedera, the point d’ironie, and the interrobang. These are all dead or dying, and the hyphen, the apostrophe, and the semicolon may be next, argues Hitchings. Blame a combination of grammatical laziness, graphic designers, and, of course, the Internet.