silverguide.site –

How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two or three every 100,000 words. He was being generous.

Florence Hazrat notes that the Nazis loved exclamation marks, with Goebbels pencilling in triplets of them into a speech for Hitler. The modern German linguist Konrad Ehlich is described here as believing that “slapping exclamation marks on to the end of statements turns all utterance into shouting, and all thinking into order”. At the same time she derides male scholars who have complained about previous editors inserting exclamation marks into the speech of Beowulf on the grounds that it feminises the hero.

What Hazrat really believes about exclamation marks, alas, may be inferred from her ultra-liberal use of them. “No such thing as binge-reading the Bible for an early-medieval monk!” runs one joke-badged parenthesis. “Let nobody claim punctuation wasn’t sexy!” “The mind and the hand of the pope – you couldn’t get much higher in the Renaissance!” To be fair, this is a nice 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.” If the reader is supposed to experience intense distress on encountering Hazrat’s own exclamation marks, then they work as intended.

The happy corollary to the author’s exclamatory incontinence is that this book is no mere wacky usage guide of the Eats, Shoots & Leaves sort; it is an appealing, lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries. After a brief prehistory about “interpuncts” (dots between words in ancient languages) and the like, we observe a great Renaissance flourishing of innovative marks designed to guide people through the rhythm and tone, and so the sense, of what they were reading. The semicolon, for example, was created by a Venetian master printer named Aldo Manuzio, who hung a sign on his door that read: “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.” Hashtag life goals.

Writers themselves, of course, have always guarded their own punctuation ferociously. (“I absolutely insist on this comma,” wrote Baudelaire, putting a removed one back in on a page proof of Les Fleurs du Mal.) Editors remove commas or dashes at their peril; equally, Hazrat shows neatly how, in adding a ton of commas to Jack Kerouac’s draft of On the Road, his first editor did violence to the breathless dynamism of the prose. This is all evidence for her admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.

The book ends in the all-too-liquid present, when “it is tech giants who choose our writing tools”, and when ending a text message with a full stop comes off as rude. Emoji are not a language, Hazrat correctly observes, but perhaps they are a form of punctuation, an expansion of affective possibilities at the end of a sentence. Most interestingly, she presents Donald Trump as a master of the rhetorical strategies afforded by punctuation, with his Goebbels-like addiction to exclamation marks and his creative use of scare quotes either to imply that Obama was not really the president or to draw attention to his own ridiculous euphemisms (his war was “our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran”).

More depressingly, Hazrat also analyses the addiction of AI language models to the em dash. Perhaps, she surmises, “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”. Does their ubiquity now herald an imminent “near-total abandon of thinking work”? If it’s a choice between chatbots and Trump, I choose the orange human.

• On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat is published by Basic (£28). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.