FAVORITE PUNCTUATION MARKS (COMMENT).

FAVORITE PUNCTUATION MARKS (COMMENT). Nick commented here on my post acknowledging that I sometimes put digressions into the middle of a sentence that: “My favorite punctuation mark in my academic papers was always the – – method.” In this post, I said that I knew a lawyer whose favorite punctuation mark was the dash. I used to say that the colon was my favorite, but I realize that in this blog, it’s the dash that I use most often—because of all the digressions. I think of material set off by dashes as being even more off the main point than material set off by parentheses. Of course, in the 18th century, as I posted here, punctuation was not used to express grammar or to relate clauses, but to indicate “oratorical pauses”