On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat.
Offering a lively history, Hazrat explores how writers have used these little marks to communicate for centuries.
“Punctuation can be an amazing springboard for discussions,” she writes. She notes that Joseph Goebbels “hijacked the punching power of the exclamation mark” for Nazi propaganda and that while all of Shakespeare’s tragedies have at least one exclamation mark, none of his comedies and history plays do, a sign that “exclamations were an expression of intense distress.”
The book is not a “mere wacky usage guide,” but rather “an appealing, lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries,” The Guardian writes. Buy On the Mark from your local bookstore.