The Printing Press

• Printers in many countries like Italy, France and Germany pioneered the use of advanced punctuation like the semicolon(invented by Italian poet Pietro Bembo) in 1494.
• The usage of the semicolon, a way to pause in a sophisticated manner, puzzled many writers(and rea...

• Early stone inscriptions did not even have the punctuation we all take for granted: The blank space.
• Ancient Greece and Rome had the written word for keeping records of political speeches and texts, which were carefully used by the orator for maximum rhetorical eff...

By the middle ages, when the comma, the full stop and the colon had become common, the question mark and the exclamation mark came in the picture, as it became clear that the spoken word was easily understood, but the written word needed emotional emphasis, clarity and intonation to be understood...

The Brackets as a form of punctuation came in the 14th century, first used by the Italian scholar Coluccio Salutati.

It was used 1500 years earlier (as a parenthesis) to separate one text from the other, forming a digression. The more subtle usage inside sentences came muc...

• The Mirrored Question Mark was created in 1575, to denote sarcasm or signal a rhetorical question.
• The Upside Down Exclamation Mark was introduced in 1668, to signal irony.

These new marks and their iterations came in various manuscr...

In 1905, Russian printers demanded to be paid for punctuation, which according to them requires the same amount of effort and time as any normal letter of the alphabet.

This ‘Comma Strike’ spread as a popular boycott, leading to political turmoil.

The digital age combined with short attention spans and time constraints has led to the demise of various punctuation skills like the omission of apostrophes, deliberate spelling mistakes and using abbreviations to a larger extent.

The new generation seems to create a new ...

• The language in the Quran had cantillation marks written above the line to signify the kind of pause required.
• The 9th Century Torah manuscripts show vowel additions and cantillation marks that help in the recitation of the same.
• Modern Arabic and Hebrew texts hav...