Edgar C. Alward

Edgar C. Alward is an American English professor and writing teacher, best known as the co-author of Punctuation Plain & Simple in the Plain English series. He taught English studies at Westfield State College in Massachusetts for thirty-five years and was awarded Professor Emeritus status in 1994.

Punctuation Plain & Simple, co-written with his wife Jean Alward, takes the traditional rule-based approach to punctuation and replaces it with one rooted in rhetorical principle and the actual syntax of English. The book covers the rules as compactly and non-grammatically as possible and uses examples designed to give writers patterns they can imitate. The goal is to make punctuation usage easier to learn because the rules connect to a writer's reason and ear rather than to memorized prescription.

Jean Alward, a personnel manager for major corporations for seventeen years before co-authoring the book, brings the practical workplace writing perspective. The result is a guide that has been used in corporate writing training, college composition courses, and self-study by working writers and editors who need a clean reference on commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, hyphens, and the rest of the marks that shape readable prose.