This short guide serves as a single reference for all of you who were never taught grammar, punctuation rules, or usage by (a) ruler-wielding nuns, (b) Old School English teachers born prior to 1945, (c) parents who worked as high-school English teachers, or (d) the necessity of mastering at least the grammar of another language. Written after a lengthy search failed to turn up a single guide that was brief, readable, and not rife with errors, I posted this comprehensive guide online over fourteen years ago to serve merely as a reference for my students tormenting themselves over grammar and punctuation. Nearly a decade later, I received a query from IBM's head of in-house publications, requesting permission to use “Where do you put the—? Punctuation made painless,” a rump version of the guide I posted online, That guide, she explained, was superior to every other source they'd investigated as a guide for writers company-wide. Of course, IBM was only too glad when I idiotically made the entire guide available to them – gratis. In the same spirit, I'm now idiotically making the same easy-to-access reference available to you, to complement the writing skills you've just mastered in the preceding pages.

Note that I've tried to use plain, commonsense terms instead of the labels nuns and Old School types prefer. During the small hours, when you're fretting over the final draft of a proposal or manuscript, you'll be grateful for my using subject pronoun, rather than nominative case. Likewise, when you need only know whether a pronoun can act like a subject or an object and which one does what, I avoid delving into the differences between personal, demonstrative, and relative pronouns. Ultimately, you need to know how to use something correctly, rather than what the experts call it. Unless you're aiming to compete on a quiz show. Or put off someone you've met on a first date.