A dash of style: the art and mastery of punctuation

Introduction

The period (the stop sign)

The comma (the speed bump)

The semicolon (the bridge)

The colon (the magician)

The dash and parentheses (the interrupter and the advisor)

Quotation marks (the trumpets)

The paragraph and section breaks (the stoplight and the town line)

The question mark, exclamation point, italics, points of ellipsis, and the hyphen.