Heard of the adage 'if looks could kill I would be dead by now'? If punctuation marks could speak, they would be saying a lot. English language punctuation, I think, has a meaning and life of its own.

Take for instance the full stop. It reminds me of a car's screeching brakes. Slam! Press them down and the sentence comes to an immediate halt. It gives one respite. It gives one a break. It is the dot of finality.

Unlike the comma though, that little crooked line that says pause, of course. The comma is a little like keeping your car rolling slowly rather than bringing it to an abrupt halt. The stop 'n' go kind of feeling, it helps the reader catch his breath mid-sentence before starting off again.

Something like a marathon runner, one of those formidably fast Kenyans or Ethiopians one sees eating up the miles during the Mumbai marathon, who suddenly cuts his speed and starts jogging slowly, maybe due to a calf strain. We can say he is in comma mode.

Then, of course, there is the question mark. It denotes surprise and curiousity just by its looping, then going straight and finishing off with the dot beneath state. Just by its shape one can say it is the 'huh' moment in a reader or writer's life. Sometimes the question can be aggressive? Sometimes, that question can be trite, valid or invalid ufffd the question is a punctuation mark that evokes raised eyebrows.

I like to thing of brackets, the square ones especially, as a bookcase. Holding both ends of a phrase or words, they are like two ends of a bookcase packed with books. The shape is aesthetic and the function is the same: hold those words together; don't let them spill out, just like a bookcase holds tomes and thin books alike.

What can be said for the exclamation mark that thing that drops like a dead weight at the end of the sentence and tells the reader something like: just imagine, or can you believe that. It has a tone of incredulity and wonder.

u00a0I do not quite know what to make of the colon or the semi-colon, I think it takes the middle road; it is a little more aggressive than a comma, a little weaker than a full stop. It's a hey-hey-hey-not-so-fast kind of sign.

You need to have a real feel for the language to make punctuations work for you. Whether it is the open inverted comma, (here we go) to the three-dot-and-space ellipsis,u00a0English is not just about words but also about dots and dashes, a full stop avoids those sentence clashes.u00a0