标点符号究竟为何存在？

What is punctuation even for? By Judith Shulevitz 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. Grammar- ians, I married him. Now our son is the fam- ily 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 semi colons,” he pro- nounced in 2005. …