Florence Hazrat's On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World offers a lavishly researched journey through the history of punctuation, arguing that dots and dashes are an essential component of style, whether used by a medieval monk or Donald Trump.
Exclamation marks and their critics
The book opens with a spirited discussion of exclamation marks, known colloquially as gaspers, screamers, dog's cocks, or shrieks. Hazrat notes that H.W. Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, warned that overuse betrays an 'uneducated or unpractised writer.' Martin Amis dismissed them as 'joke badges,' while Theodor Adorno called them 'soundless cymbal-crashing.' Novelist Elmore Leonard set a strict limit of two or three per 100,000 words, a rule he considered generous.
Hazrat observes that the Nazis were particularly fond of exclamation marks, with Joseph Goebbels pencilling in triplets into a speech for Hitler. German linguist Konrad Ehlich is quoted as believing that 'slapping exclamation marks on to the end of statements turns all utterance into shouting, and all thinking into order.' Yet Hazrat also critiques male scholars who complained about editors inserting exclamation marks into the speech of Beowulf, arguing that doing so 'feminises the hero.'
Despite her scholarly tone, Hazrat's own liberal use of exclamation marks suggests a personal fondness for them. She writes: 'No such thing as binge-reading the Bible for an early-medieval monk!' and 'Let nobody claim punctuation wasn't sexy!' However, she offers a nuanced observation: 'All Shakespearean tragedies have at least one exclamation mark, while the six comedies and two history plays don't have any at all. It's not farfetched to conclude that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, exclamations were an expression of intense distress, rather than "screechy" hysteria.'
Punctuation's Renaissance and beyond
The book traces punctuation's evolution from ancient 'interpuncts'—dots between words in ancient languages—to the Renaissance, when innovative marks were designed to guide readers through rhythm, tone, and meaning. The semicolon, for instance, was created by Venetian master printer Aldo Manuzio, who famously hung a sign on his door: 'Whoever you are, Aldo asks you again and again what it is you want from him. State your business briefly, and then immediately go away.'
Writers have always guarded their punctuation fiercely. Hazrat recounts how Charles Baudelaire insisted on a comma in Les Fleurs du Mal, writing on a page proof: 'I absolutely insist on this comma.' Conversely, she shows how Jack Kerouac's first editor did violence to the breathless dynamism of On the Road by adding a ton of commas to his draft. This evidence supports Hazrat's central argument: punctuation is an integral part of writing, essential to style and the architecture of thought.
Modern punctuation and digital influence
The book concludes in the present day, when 'it is tech giants who choose our writing tools,' and ending a text message with a full stop can come off as rude. Emoji, Hazrat correctly observes, are not a language but may be a form of punctuation, expanding affective possibilities at the end of a sentence.
Hazrat presents Donald Trump as a master of punctuation's rhetorical strategies, with a Goebbels-like addiction to exclamation marks and creative use of scare quotes to imply that Obama was not really the president or to draw attention to his own euphemisms, such as 'our lovely "stay" in Iran.'
More depressingly, Hazrat analyses AI language models' addiction to the em dash. She surmises that 'the models have deliberately been trained to seem human by imitating the spontaneity of voice—precisely why dashes were so interesting to Renaissance playwrights like Ben Jonson.' She questions whether their ubiquity heralds an imminent 'near-total abandon of thinking work.'
On the Mark is published by Basic Books (£28).
