I was a novice editor, he was an experienced writer, and the first article he turned in revealed a virtuosic command of comma placement. He opened with long, slow clauses; picked up speed with shorter ones; withheld all commas for a gloriously terse thesis statement; and then, crash! A mass-casualty pileup of appositive phrases. Grammarians, I married him.

Now our son is the family authority on punctuation. His expertise lies in using it in texts and on social media, where commas and periods go to die. Semicolons too, decades after Kurt Vonnegut tried to banish them. “First rule: Do not use semicolons,” he pronounced in 2005. “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Exclamation points and emoji reign supreme. (Does an emoji count as punctuation or rate as a paralinguistic element—that is, a relative of a wink or an eye roll? My son shrugs.) Online punctuation is for torquing emotion, he told me, not for making yourself clear: “The ultimate goal is not efficiency but maximum attention.”

Little marks can make big things happen, Florence Hazrat reminds us in her new book, On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World. Take the one-sentence Second Amendment, whose commas have been responsible for a great deal of trouble: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Until the 21st century, all parts of the amendment were given equal weight regardless of commas, so that the gun rights granted in its second half were limited to the militias referred to in the first half. In 2008, however, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia affirmed an unusual interpretation that used a comma to downplay the clause about militias, leaving “the people” with an individual right to bear arms.

But the eminent originalist—of all people!—failed to acknowledge an important historical fact. The version of the amendment on which Scalia based his reading, found in the National Archives, is only one among many. “Each state ratified a different version of this amendment,” Hazrat writes, “some with two, some with three, and some with four commas.” Punctuation was not standardized in the Founders’ time, so the best course of action, she says, is not to read too much into those commas.

The rules of punctuation have been codified since then, but they have never stopped evolving. Indeed, thanks to the advent of technologies that have us typing more and more, the rules have been hyper-evolving. Marks do more than fit parts of a sentence together; they re-create the pace, emphasis, and tone of voice that we rely on to make our meaning plain when we talk in person or by phone. Now that we can react to a friend’s needy text or an enemy’s infuriating post in real time and with minimal reflection, we need reliable substitutes for extraverbal cues more than ever. But if online punctuation is about maximum attention rather than mutual comprehension, and is mutating so rapidly, you have to wonder about the future of communication.

In the beginning was the written word, and the word flowed into other words. Roughly 5,000 years ago, WRITINGLOOKEDLIKETHIS. Then, slowly, graphic signposts emerged to make reading easier. Hazrat takes us through this history: Babylonians arranged words into boxes, creating proto-paragraphs. Old Assyrian and Old Persian put triangles between words. The demands of empire spurred invention. In the second century B.C.E., the head librarian of the world’s most ambitious collection of writings, the Library of Alexandria, hired linguists and scholars from far-flung lands, and, to help them read Greek, came up with a system of accents to guide pronunciation and dots to indicate pauses.

Those dots were forgotten after the decline of Rome, but they reappeared in different guises with the spread of monotheistic religions: The word of God demands proper punctuation. The printing press brought an explosion of published material, and soon the modern book was born, set in different typefaces and organized with many of the marks still used today. Renaissance humanists discovered the literary potential of punctuation, inventing nuanced marks such as the exclamation point, the semicolon, dashes, and parentheses (“little moons,” the Dutch scholar Erasmus fondly called them). These new devices allowed sentences to ramble along twisty paths of thought, opening up new realms of the self.

Ever since, poets and novelists have been developing punctuation into a high art, as Lee Clark Mitchell shows in Mark My Words: Profiles of Punctuation in Modern Literature (2020). Emily Dickinson wielded dashes like a fencer in her poems, slicing phrases apart, creating islands of heightened meaning. The dashes were edited out after her death and not restored until 1955; Hazrat reports that Dickinson used dashes of different sizes and shapes—curving upward and downward and back on themselves—that modern typography still hasn’t captured. Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, directs 450 parenthetical asides to the reader, giving us all-too-intimate access to the thoughts of a floridly narcissistic pedophile. Pulling readers into a different dark world, the 2026 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down, never uses a single period. Set in the trenches of World War I, the novel careens from scene to scene, “gasping with too many commas,” Kraus has written, “a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave.”

Today’s online punctuation styles cycle in and out of fashion with manic speed. To digital natives, periods at the end of text messages signify passive-aggressiveness. They’re “the texting equivalent of your mother calling your full name,” the Gen Z language expert Adam Aleksic, who goes by Etymology Nerd, explained in a 2024 TikTok. Except it’s not that simple: My son and his friends do sometimes end texts with periods—to convey faux disapproval. “Correct punctuation itself is a signal of irony,” he told me.

That figures. Every generation has to come up with its own way of subverting norms. The quest to punctuate irony goes back to at least the late 16th century, when a printer proposed a backward-facing question mark. A scientist later suggested using the upside-down exclamation point. Nothing stuck. A 20th-century French novelist suggested the Greek letter psi—Ψ. It looked fittingly like an arrow in the air. (“Irony stings,” Hazrat comments.) Only the hashtag, which rose to prominence on Twitter, has had some staying power as an irony marker—a punch line, a self-deprecating remark.

Hazrat worries that in our disembodied age, communication demands punctuation that can do more emotional labor than our current marks can handle. She has a point: Think of all the micro-adjustments we have to make as we go from texting family and friends to slacking colleagues to emailing to posting. But I think the problem with online punctuation is that it does too much, not too little. At any rate, my stabs at punctuating like someone in the know generally make me look silly.

I’m not alone. A genre has materialized in which children critique parents’ cringey misuse of marks. Madeline Cash, in Granta, puzzles over her mother’s habit of ending innocuous statements with an ominous ellipsis. “OK …” her mother writes when Cash says she’s coming home to visit. Cash wonders: “Is she going to say more? Is my coming home for Christmas an imposition?” My son sent me a viral 2025 TikTok in which a perky young man gives his parents a slide-deck presentation on when to use the double-exclamation-point iMessage reaction, called the emphasis. He lays out three rules; his mother’s emphases follow none of them.

Hey! My emphases don’t either. Why hadn’t my son ever told me that? “Because I’m resigned to old people using it wrong,” he texted, plus he’s not in the business of making me look cool. Anyway, the standard emoji and text reactions are becoming passé. His crowd uses an inexhaustible idiolect of personalized symbols—memes, memoji (customizable avatars), stickers (emoji made from random images and photographs), GIFs.

[From the August 2025 issue: What are emoji?]

My son sent me an example: a sticker of Dora the Explorer with a glowing third eye. She’s lying on a pink pillow, wearing a CPAP mask. The meaning was nonobvious, to say the least. He explained: Dora is achieving nirvana while plugged into a machine that delivers a steady flow of air, a metaphor for being connected to the internet. Oh. How did he know that? “How could you not?” he wrote. Dora’s bliss was several levels of meta beyond my age group, but I guess that’s as it should be. For now, I’ll work on not putting periods at the end of my texts.

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This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “Full Stop.”  When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.