The History of Punctuation

Most of us never think about punctuation when we read books or internet articles or short texts. But when someone send you a longer, more involved message and they don't use punctuation, then you start to appreciate it. Punctuation is there to make written text seem more like a natural monologue or conversation. Believe it or not, when writing with letters was first developed, there weren't even spaces between words, much less marks to indicate how the words should sound. Sure, few people knew how to read, but when someone read that text out loud, how it was done made a difference. As more people learned to read, those marks had to be standardized. Dr. Erica Brozovsky tells the story of how different kinds of punctuation came to be and why.