The Curious Power of Punctuation

Louis Menand reviews Florence Hazrat’s On the Mark, a breezy history that treats commas, dashes, semicolons and spaces as forces that shaped reading and social order. He opens with Jane Austen’s manuscripts versus published text to show how punctuation changes tone and authorial voice, then surveys origins - periods attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium, an early question mark in Syriac, the exclamation mark in the fourteenth century - and credits the printing press with standardizing many marks. Hazrat crowns the space as transformative, arguing that spacing and other technical changes widened access to literacy and redistributed power. Menand accepts that writing technology correlates with social change but criticizes Hazrat’s overreach (notably a strained linkage between Hebrew punctuation and Zionist history) and notes factual slips about the semicolon and other marks.

Menand also discusses Sarah L. Kaufman’s Verb Your Enthusiasm, a style guide that makes a case for privileging strong verbs and pruning adjectives, adverbs and passive constructions. Kaufman uses F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last sentence in The Great Gatsby to argue that verbs produce bodily resonance and offers practical newsroom-friendly rules - prefer monosyllables, use “he said,” ban limp adverbs - while Menand warns these prescriptions reflect newspaper constraints more than universal aesthetics. He closes by noting digital communication has introduced new signifiers - emojis, verbing nouns like e‑mail - so punctuation’s role continues to shift even as its basic functions endure.