For National Punctuation Day, The Atlantic Wire collected favorite punctuation marks from famous writers. I’m with NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan, who says:
“The semicolon is my psychological metaphor, my mascot. It’s the punctuation mark that qualifies, hesitates, and ties together ideas and parts of a life that shot off in different directions.”
Man, I am a semicolon fiend. It lets a sentence breathe while still organizing. In a punctuation world of black and white (full stop!), it’s nice to have a punctuation mark that covers some sentence gray area.
I also love the Oxford comma and get upset whenever I hear a certain Vampire Weekend song.
Share your favorites in the comments!
I like ellipses…
While I love me some semi-colon, I think my favorite thing–since I learned about it in college–is the em-dash. I used to love parentheses (who doesn’t?), but they’re sort of a no-no in fiction. Enter the em-dash; it works almost the same.