The convicted killer crab walked between two walls and pushed through newly installed razor wire to break out of prison’ was a genuine CNN news alert I came across a few years ago. 

Anyone who received this notification should have been rightly petrified that a homicidal crustacean had walked free to terrorise man once more. Perhaps less excitingly, this is simply an example of why punctuation is important. When a hyphen is added to ‘crab-walked’, any and all fears of a science-fiction crab are instantly put to rest.

In this delightful book, Florence Hazrat spotlights the oft-ignored scaffolding of every sentence, taking us through the history of punctuation from Ancient Egypt to the emoticon. We rarely pay much attention to the dots, dashes and swirls that pepper every page, but how they got there and the influence these marks wield is a fascinating, millennia-long story.

When civilisation was young, the words we put on cuneiform tablets were just that. No capital letters, no spaces and certainly no punctuation. Aristophanes of Byzantium (chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria in the 2nd century BC) started using dots on a page to indicate when someone reading out loud should stop and take a breath. With that, the weird and wonderful history of punctuation had begun.

One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Ben Jonson, became completely obsessed with the dash. For Jonson, fragmenting sentences with a dash was a way for language to imitate ‘the public riot’ and reflect ‘individual and social chaos’ on the page.

Interestingly, anyone who’s dabbled with ChatGPT knows that the language model is equally obsessed with including a dash.

Look at this!

That should have put you in ‘pre-panic mode’, according to a professor of social psychology Hazrat quotes. He argues that an exclamation mark on a page instantly makes the reader ‘low level anxious’.

Politicians often want to whip up panic in voters and inspire a sort of political fervour that can get them elected.

Perhaps this is why Donald Trump used 57,000 exclamation marks in 33,000 tweets.

Hazrat believes that punctuation is one of the most extraordinary inventions in human history, and it’s difficult to argue. These funny little symbols have been the way the greatest minds in human history (and the some of the not so great) have transmitted their thoughts, feelings and unique voice on to the page.

At times the book feels a little obsessive, but on the whole, it’s a heartily entertaining look at the characters who formed the way we write today.