Punctuation is what we all use, but rarely think about. Academic writing suffers from poor punctuation more than most genres. Too many academics forget to use a full stop, for example, partly, perhaps, because they think their thoughts just go on and on and on, and mustn’t be interrupted. But the full stop is a wonderful little piece of punctuation, in good uses, giving the reader a chance to take a breath, albeit in bad uses a bit of a macho mark. Commas are good friends for marking out sub-clauses, but they have a secret: they are great at emphasising the word before the comma. Semi-colons can create a neat two-part sentence. Exclamation marks have almost no role in academic writing. Question marks remind us that questioning should be at the heart of all research. (Real questions, not those pesky rhetorical ones.) Colons are good introductions, like a well-mannered party-host. We even discuss en-dashes and em-dashes – the latter expressing poetic openness when used at the end of a sentence, as in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. (In academic writing, em-dashes are more useful at providing for subclauses, when there are already too many commas in the sentence.) Bullet-points are like showy semi-colons.
Punctuation marks are quiet alternatives to emojis, and Lynn Truss has written whole books about them. We just have a podcast.
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