Top Punctuation Quotes

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?

What sort of person, said Salzella patiently, sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Ope...

Punctuation Definition

(n.) The act or art of punctuating or pointing a writing or discourse; the art or mode of dividing literary composition into sentences, and members of a sentence, by means of points, so as to elucidate the author's meaning.

So the particular strengths of the colon are beginning to become clear. A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to...

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition fr...

I wish for sorrow to be a full stop and happiness to be a comma in my life.

I comma square bracket recruit's name square bracket comma do solemnly swear by square bracket recruit's deity of choice square bracket to uphold the Laws and Ordinances of the City of Ankh-Morpork co...

Yes, you can see the bullet points here, here and here, sir; there are multiple back-slashes, of course. And that’s a forward slash. I would have to call this a frenzied attack. Did anyone hear the in...

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as Thank God its Friday (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive its (no apost...

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if...

While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation...

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.Why? asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly...

Clicking on send has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals (I AM joking!) to compensate. That's why they came...

Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.) Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying within...

Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried i...

Punctuation, is? fun!

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word punctilious (attentive to formality or etiquette) comes from th...

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.