Weird 19th-Century Punctuation Marks You Should Try Using

Ever heard of the “colash”? Or the “commash”?

Writers often worry about overusing punctuation.

This is particularly true of the m-dash. Last year when I released the app Just The Punctuation — which, as the name suggests, takes a piece of your writing and strips out everything but the punctuation — some writers said they were too afraid to try using it. Why? Because it would reveal that they’re wildly profligate users of m-dashes …

Me, I see no problem. I am a huge fan of this much-maligned punctuation mark, so much so that I wrote a follow-up essay arguing the manifold merits of the m-dash. (tl;dr: It’s anarchic, digressive, a connector, and graphically pretty. But go read the whole essay!)

So basically I am Team Punctuation, or perhaps more accurately, Team Aggressive Overuse Of Complex Combos Of Punctuation.

But why don’t we — as they say in energy-drink-marketing circles — take it to the next level?

I’m here to introduce you to three forms of punctuation that you’ve probably never seen before.