The Curious Power of Punctuation

Commas, dashes, semicolons, and spaces have shaped how we read for centuries. What happens when machines start crafting the sentences?September 21, 2026Jane Austen favored dashes. Her editors may have applied the commas we now think of as unmistakably Austenian.Illustration by Abraham LuleDo you know the first sentence of “Pride and Prejudice”? You probably think you do, but I bet you don’t. The answer is “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Did you remember to put in the commas?What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. Did Jane Austen even write them? Probably not. Judging by her few surviving manuscripts, Austen didn’t much use commas (or paragraphs). She used dashes.Here is a passage from the manuscript of her last finished novel, “Persuasion”:“To see you, cried he, in the midst of those who could not be my well-wishers, to see your Cousin close by you—conversing & smiling—& feel all the horrible Eligibilities & Proprieties of the Match!—to consider it as the certain wish of every being who could hope to influence you—even, if your own feelings were reluctant, or indifferent—to consider what powerful supports would be his !”Here is the same passage from the published book:“To see you,” cried he, “in the midst of those who could not be my well-wishers, to see your cousin close by you, conversing and smiling, and feel all the horrible eligibilities and proprieties of the match! To consider it as the certain wish of every being who could hope to influence you! Even if your own feelings were reluctant or indifferent, to consider what powerful supports would be his!”And so on. The published version replaces five dashes and three ampersands, and lowercases four capitalized nouns. It sounds more like Austen, but maybe Austen really sounded like Virginia Woolf.Austen must have made some of these revisions herself, but it is believed that the grammar and punctuation in her later novels were cleaned up by a man named William Gifford, who was an editor at Austen’s publisher, John Murray. (“Pride and Prejudice” was an early novel, published by a different house.) Which might mean that the polished, quasi-epigrammatic sentences we find so Austenian may not be sentences Austen actually wrote.Florence Hazrat, the author of “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World” (Basic), would wish to point out that the difference for the reader in these two versions of “Persuasion” is entirely a function of the punctuation. Change dashes to commas, smooth out the prose, and the whole Austen experience is altered. What was pell-mell and excited becomes thoughtful and decorous.Hazrat’s book is a history of punctuation—or some punctuation, since it barely mentions the apostrophe, the serial comma, or quotation marks. “On the Mark” is a “the X that changed the world” book, which is a popular genre. Its claim is that “the history of punctuation is the history of humanity.”This ambition inevitably leads to overreach. If punctuation played a role in everything, what about, say, the war in Gaza? Hazrat finds a link. “Punctuation marks in Hebrew,” she explains, “are relics of a brutal colonial system that is far from over.” Adding punctuation turned Hebrew into a spoken language, “paving the way for an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe, encouraging them to move to the land that already had people—a people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European anti-Semitism in the most horrendous ways for generations.” It seems (the reason is not altogether clear) that, had Yiddish been the official language of Israel, atrocities might have been avoided.Zionist complicities aside, Hazrat is a punctuation enthusiast, though there are a few marks that she is not very fond of. The semicolon is one. She calls it “a dreamy kind of mark for meandering minds.” I would have said that the comma splice is the dreamy mark for meandering minds, not the semicolon, whose function is to replace the comma splice. But she doesn’t seem to know the semicolon’s correct usage. She thinks it’s a big comma, when it’s actually a small period.On the other hand, she can’t get enough of the parenthesis, which, she says, dates to antiquity. I had always thought of parentheticals as subversive, a teasing or skeptical interpolation, the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Hazrat understands them in pretty much the opposite way. “The parenthesis is a gentle kind of interruption, stable and predictable and balanced,” she says. “The parenthesis in word and deed is an ethical way of life.” (Since I use a lot of parentheses, this was encouraging.)She tells us that the sentence-ending period was invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, the head of the Library of Alexandria, in the second or third century B.C.E.; that the earliest known question mark is in a fifth-century document written in Syriac, a language close to Aramaic, which Jesus spoke; and that the exclamation mark dates from the mid-fourteenth century. The invention of the printing press, around 1440, let loose what she describes as “a flurry of signs,” including the semicolon, quotation marks, the dash, and the ellipsis. No new marks have been added since 1600 (unless you count emojis, which we will get to).In Hazrat’s view, the greatest changed-the-world punctuation mark of all time is the space. She tells us that it was invented in the eighth century by Irish monks to separate the words in a sentence. She calls this hack “revolutionary.” “Perhaps,” she says, “it would be a stretch to say that the Irish monks’ invention led to the liberations of classes and genders, caused wars and peaceful pacts, and paved the way for economic booms and busts, literary masterpieces from Hamlet to Les Misérables, and the development of the internet. Perhaps that’s going too far, and perhaps not far enough.”I would say too far. But she has a point. The history of punctuation is the history of humanity in the sense that changes in the technology of writing—changes in how we write and how we make what we have written available to readers—correlate with changes in the distribution of social power. The purpose of punctuation is to make writing easier to read, and making writing easier to read means giving greater and greater numbers of people access to the written word. Literacy is no longer the monopoly of a privileged class. Today, even the gatekeepers are gone, or have turned into paywalls.The excitement that Hazrat feels about punctuation—little marks that make a big difference—is a lot like Sarah L. Kaufman’s enthusiasm for verbs. Verbs, Kaufman tells us in “Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing” (Penguin Press), “can leap off the page and land in our bodies. They tickle the senses. They delight the instinct for movement. At times, they may tell you something true about yourself. All that in a word.” Verbs are infinitely adaptable, she says. They are “the Cate Blanchetts of language.”The book is about how to use and misuse the different parts of speech (there are nine), with an emphasis on the verb. Kaufman has a favorite sentence that serves as a touchstone. It’s the last sentence of “The Great Gatsby,” and I bet you do know this one: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” She grows eloquent on the magic of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s diction. “You might feel his verbs in your body, so delicately you’re not quite aware of it,” she says. “The repeated B sound—beat, boats, borne back—is percussive. The physical resonance of the verb beat may echo internally in many ways, as you feel a soft drumbeat, as your heart beats. Reading ‘borne back’ may light a brief, indistinct flickering inside, a sense of how your own consciousness can whoosh backward in time.”Apart from the fact that I have never understood what Fitzgerald is trying to say here—isn’t the whole point of the book not that Gatsby is doomed to return to the past but that he can’t?—I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”? “Paddle” sounds a little silly, but that’s the metaphor Fitzgerald is using. (Those boats must be canoes, not steamboats. A steamboat wouldn’t care that much about a current.)Kaufman spent many years as the chief dance critic for the Washington Post, a job that must demand novel and unexpected ways of saying “leaping,” “lifting,” and “pirouetting”—hence her verb fascination. But she has thoughts about other parts of speech as well, and she offers a good deal of usage advice. Basically, “Verb Your Enthusiasm” is a style guide for newspaper writers: cut down on adjectives and adverbs, avoid the passive voice, prefer monosyllabic words, always say “he said” (not “he shouted,” “whispered,” “stated,” “averred,” and so on).These tips make for good newspaper writing, but unless you are Ernest Hemingway, who began his career as a newspaper reporter and credited the Kansas City Star’s style guide with forming the basis of his style, they do not define good writing per se. Newspaper writing differs from most other writing because print-newspaper space is finite. The fewer words you use, and the more recognizable they are, the more you can say and the faster you can say it. That is where this modern minimalist verbal style comes from. Joan Didion, the mistress of concision and a Hemingway admirer, began her career writing captions and sidebars to fit around pictures in women’s magazines. Most writers don’t have those constraints, real or imaginary.Still, Kaufman thinks that, if we are looking to speed the eye and save space, one part of speech we should be happy to throw overboard is the adverb. Her point is that if you have picked the right verb it won’t need to