Broadly understood, punctuation refers to any non-alphabetical sign in a text, including for example the paragraph sign or pilcrow, footnotes, commas, the @ symbol, exclamation marks, asterisks, ampersands, hashtags, apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, or tildes. A more specific set of common punctuation marks gives information on meaning, performance, and tone of text. Among those are spaces, the full stop, colon, semi-colon, comma, question and exclamation mark, brackets, and the dash. These marks help clarify boundaries and grammatical relationships between words, indicate pauses and rhythm for reading (out loud or with an internal voice), and suggest emotional tone and emphasis.
What punctuation is and how it works is intimately intertwined with technologies of writing and the uses to which writing is put. When writing is a record of speech, punctuation may attempt to encode oral performance,...
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Citation: Hazrat, Florence. "Punctuation in Literature". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 November 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19611, accessed 08 December 2025.]
