Category: punctuation...

• punctuation is the conventional practice of "pointing" a writing composition to divide it into sentences and portions of sentences - thus indicating what would in speech be pauses or changes of expression (Latin punctum/punctus "point"0
• Aldus Manutius introduced a regular system of punctuation in the 16th C, derived from the dots of Greek grammarians
• the Greek interrogation mark ; became the English semicolon
• the main purpose of punctuation is to clarify the grammar of the text
• elocutionary punctuation is used to indicate pauses, speed, and rhythm in reading
• My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. (Ernest Hemingway)
• The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood.... For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid. (Edgar Allan Poe)
• Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath. (Lewis Thomas)
• Questioning a comma, he will shake his head and say in his soft voice that he realizes perfectly well what a lot of time and thought have gone into the comma and that in the ordinary course of events he would be the first to say that the comma was precisely the form of punctuation that he would have been most happy to encounter at that very place in the sentence, but isn't there the possibility-oh, only the remotest one, to be sure, and yet perhaps worth considering for a moment in the light of the care already bestowed on the construction-that the sentence could be made to read infinitesimally more clearly if, say, instead of a comma a semicolon were to be inserted at just that point? (Brendan Gill)

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