Contempt of quote: The fight to save punctuation

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greeks wrote without any spaces, punctuations or distinction between capital letters or lowercase. To the modern eye this would look like undecipherable code: just capital letters scribbled together continuously on stone tablets and scrolls.

But it was also a time when parchment was expensive and the spoken word had more relevance and impact in a hardly literate world. Understanding unfamiliar documents on the first read was a struggle, so the humble dot was introduced to break the stream of text. The suggestion, by a librarian in Alexandria, was a breakthrough. The dots represented pauses but not the grammatical boundaries of punctuation today.

It was only by the 7th century CE that these dots were distinguished according to their placement (low, middle and high) to represent short, medium or long pauses, as well as horizontal strokes in between sections.

Scribes started to punctuate in order to make reading manuscripts aloud easier, signalling pauses and intonation, writes linguist David Crystal in Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation (2015). Later, it was grammarians and printers who systemised these symbols in order to understand the semantics on the page.

“This is where we see the origins of virtually all the arguments over punctuation that have continued down the centuries and which are still with us today,” he writes.

Today, the usage of punctuation has evolved, sometimes even erroneously, to the extent that some are considered endangered (such as the semicolon which is believed to be on the path of a slow death, while apostrophes remain commonly misused), but what it does to the written word largely remains the same.

Today, there are collectives are striving to preserve the use of correct punctuation, new symbols are being designed to resist the homogenisation of language by AI even as newer, younger, communities debate their role in online communication.

(For a fun, mid-story exercise, count the number of punctuation marks in this story).

Grammar guardians

One man's frustration with the misuse of punctuation, sparked a movement to protect the symbol. In 2001, a miffed British journalist named John Richards started the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS). Richards had spent most of his working life in journalism, which involved editing copies, rewording clumsy phrasing, correcting grammatical errors, and in particular, adding, deleting and repositioning apostrophes.

“When John retired, this irritation didn't disappear but became even more obvious. Everywhere he went he saw the same mistakes over and over again until he decided that he could no longer ignore it and formed the society,” says Bob McCalden, the current Chairman of APS. Richard started his efforts in the local library, in the town of Boston, Lincolnshire, by persuading staff to rewrite CD's to CDs.

Followers of the website submitted several examples of apostrophe misuse, while Richards contacted offending businesses to encourage them to correct their mistakes.

In 2006, Harrod's, Selfridge's and Curry's dropped the apostrophes to be renamed Harrods, Selfridges, and Currys. In 2012, Waterstone's (the popular British book retailer in London) announced that they were dropping the apostrophe from their name, leading to outrage from Richard and his team of punctuation warriors.

However by November 2019, Richards conceded defeat, famously saying “ignorance and laziness had won” before he decided to shut down APS. “He was 96 by then and I think he had just run out of energy for continuing the mission,” says McCalden.

McCalden relaunched the mission in 2022. Today its website has clear guidance on all aspects of apostrophe use. It highlights name boards, street signs, even social media memes indulging in the wrongful use of the punctuation and also invites people to submit their own photographic examples of misplaced, omitted or extraneous apostrophes. Apostrophes are most commonly misused in simple plurals. Whether it's ‘apple's', ‘menu's', or ‘coffee's', it's always wrong. The other classic error is the confusion between ‘its' and ‘it's'.

With over 5000 members across the English-speaking world, the society puts out quarterly newsletters and serves as an informal database of the incorrect usage of the apostrophe. McCalden is also in the process of contacting schools to encourage sessions on the correct usage of the apostrophe.

The semicolon, ;, is slowly falling out of favour too. “Many people simply don't know how to use it, and it is in danger of dying out,” says McCalden. In May 2025, The Guardian reported the semicolon seems to be in terminal decline, with its usage in English books plummeting by almost half in two decades – from one appearing in every 205 words in 2000 to one use in every 390 words today.

A dash of drama

In May 2025, the topic of another versatile punctuation -- the em dash -- found its way into a brainstorming session at Cocogun, an independent creative agency based in Sydney, Australia.

“It started with a part-grumble about the ChatGPT-ification of language,”says Ant Melder, creative partner and co-founder of Cocogun. They mused about creating a new ‘un-generatable' typographic symbol as the flag in the sand for human writing.

Over the last few years, they had noticed the rise in the usage of generative AI in writing, and its telltale giveaway -- the em-dash overuse.

“Great writing is great thinking, and to us, writing that's AI-generated is often easy to spot and feels soulless. We began to wonder if the odd generated social post and paragraph of web copy were just canaries in the mine. Are we approaching a world where generated words are the rule rather than the exception?” asks Melder.

So the Am Dash was born. A quirky cousin of the em dash, curved at the ends, and human enough to fool Large Language Models.

It was launched through two new, tailored typefaces: Times New Human and Areal, made available to download and use freely. “The fonts have been downloaded thousands of times so far. People have been in touch with us from all over the world to talk through it, debate, share and champion it,” adds Melder. The idea is to enable writers of all kinds, from journalists to authors to copywriters, to take back control, he says.

What will the punctuations of the future look like? “Probably a bit more like the messages in your Whatsapp chats,” says Melder.

Different contexts of use have different linguistic norms which is why the use of punctuation is so fluid, says Laurel MacKenzie, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at the department of linguistics, New York University. Using standard punctuation still seems to be a strongly enforced norm in academic and other formal written contexts.

The norms are different in other contexts. “For instance, when you leave someone a brief handwritten note (e.g. Back in five minutes), you may not bother ending it with a period: the norm doesn't require it. The norms concerning punctuation are different online, as well.”

Receiving a text saying “ok.” instead of “ok” in the online messaging world seems so much more intimidating. It's because full stops are associated with falling intonation (in the same way that a question mark indicates rising intonation), which doesn't often occur in actual speech, and many of our messages are designed to replicate speech.

In some contexts (like “ok.”), implied falling intonation can be interpreted as passive-aggressive or angry, writes linguist Gretchen McCulloch in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (2019).

She writes that given the developments that have occurred in the last twenty years alone, it is highly likely that these conventions will continue to change, and generations to come will develop their own conventions for irony, passive aggression, and humour. For instance, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been omitting full stops and capitalisation in digital communication to appear more natural and sincere, and thereby less formal or aggressive. But should that really be a point of concern?

“It's much more like conversational dialogue, where grammar and punctuation are less of a focus,” says McCalden. Great writers from James Joyce to Emily Dickinson and Jack Kerouac to Roddy Doyle have all taken a liberal approach to punctuation and grammar, adds Melder.

Taking a pause to understand why new symbols (like the upside-down question mark meant as sarcasm) have not caught on in formal written language might help. “These things need to originate organically, as communities of language users naturally come to a consensus. So I'm not surprised that many suggested new punctuation marks haven't caught on,” explains MacKenzie. Besides, the norms of the formal written language tend to be more conservative and thus slower to change than the norms of spoken language or informal written language, she adds.

Today, emojis have replaced punctuation for gestures people would make if communicating in person.

“From that perspective, the set of punctuations has expanded. People writing online are very creative; in addition to emojis, they may use patterns of capitalisation or other symbols (e.g. asterisks) to convey nuances of meaning that come through offline in facial expressions, gestures, or tone of voice, but would be otherwise lost in text,” she adds.

Language has always changed, and will continue to change, MacKenzie reminds us. The medium and tools shift. “If people want to communicate something, they will generally find a way!” she adds.

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Source: HindustanTimes
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