The question mark, said Gertrude Stein, is "positively revolting". She thought the exclamation mark "ugly" and "unnecessary". Cormac McCarthy shuns the semi-colon. At times James Joyce avoided even commas. Good prose is greeted with loud applause, but good punctuation draws attention to itself only when done badly, rather like goalkeeping. In the beginning was the word, and each word was without spaces from one to the next. No wonder stone carvers didn't write novels. A librarian at Alexandria in the third century bc is credited with being the first to use a system of high, intermediate and subordinate dots to instruct readers to pause and breathe - early punctuation was intended to help us with reading aloud; the silent reader came later. Much of it still does that job. Brackets are for a muttered aside; question marks denote inflection as much as interrogation. A few marks, the apostrophe and ampersand among them, stand in for something more long-winded.
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