Quotes About Punctuation

Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it.

pretentious and over-active" semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.

I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation – but for many it may be too late.

Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons

As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price.

So how should you use a colon, to begin with? H. W. Fowler said that the colon delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words, which is not a bad image to start off with.

The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is "ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly".

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

it was Manutius who invented italics, introduced the semicolon and gave the comma its distinctive hooked shape. As

Jefferson's pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder. That

Life is the only sentence which doesn't end with a period.

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

No one requires commas in conversation, as in writing; however, even that, everyone understands rightly and precisely.

Grammar is the grave of letters.

I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences.

It can convert nouns into verbs, and change a description of a panda bear ("Eats shoots and leaves") into a description of Jesse James ("Eats, shoots, and leaves"). No intelligent construction of a text can ignore its punctuation.

the serial comma—that is, the comma after the penultimate item in a series and just before the conjunction (a, b, and c). Authorities on English usage overwhelmingly recommend using the serial comma to prevent ambiguities.

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

The question mark, used well, may be the most profoundly human form of punctuation. Unlike the other marks, the question mark—except perhaps when used in a rhetorical question—imagines the Other. It envisions communication not as assertive but as interactive, even conversational.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a speed bump; the semicolon is what a driver education teacher calls a "rolling stop"; the parenthetical expression is a detour; the colon is a flashing yellow light that announces something important up ahead; the dash is a tree branch in the road.

Punctuation comes from the Latin root punctus, or "point." Those funny dots, lines, and squiggles help writers point the way. To help readers, we punctuate for two reasons: 1. To set the pace of reading. 2. To divide words, phrases, and ideas into convenient groupings.

Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary?