2 June 2004. Today a few observations about punctuation, riled into being by a recent column of George Will's. I shouldn't say that. Will's column is quite entertaining, and I agree with most of it. But I'm for all the punctuation marks available, and he isn't. Here's what he says about "the almost-always-ghastly exclamation point": it "has been rightly compared to canned laughter. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was like laughing at yoour own joke. But not always. Victor Hugo, wondering how his Les Miserables was selling, sent this telegram to his publisher: '?' The publisher wired back: '!'" (Nice to be able to requote from a requoter.)

I use exclamation points quite a bit. Among their virtues are their ability, through being repeated, to indicate degrees of what they represent. The question mark is the only other punctuation mark, so far as I know, that can also do this. Exclamation marks can increase the ability of a period to indicate understatement, as well. "What'd you think of that movie, Joe? Wasn't it terrific?!"

"Yeah."

Try that exchange without the exclamation point. Of course, one could add adjectives to bring one's volume up or down, but I tend to prefer as many ways of operating as there are. So, I use capitalization, underlining and italics as well as exclamation points.

When younger, I went through an anti-comma phase but now I'm commaphilic. One big result is that I use them after any adverb, participle, adverbial phrase, participial phrase, or the like, at the beginning of a sentence. My rationale: every once in a while such a phrase will lead to ambiguity--for example: "Quietly ambitious young men paced the hallway, waiting for the office to open." To avoid accidentally letting this happen, I always insert a comma (except when forgetting to). Then, too, I like pauses. Anything to keep people from reading too fast. I have to admit that I also like going against fashion, and the current fashion is minimal punctuation.

I approve of colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, period trails denoting ellipses . . . I'm for all the kinds of brackets, though I don't often use ['s or <'s and their mates.

My impression is that those favoring minimal punctuation are generally conformists used to having everything they write understood--because they never say anything not predictable, and long-accepted, and saying it predictably. In fact, I believe that one's need for punctuation marks is directly proportionate to the size of one's imagination.

My only rule for punctuating, however, is to be able to defend one's practice, whatever it is.