A Brief History of English Punctuation. The familiar marks that punctuate text – the periods, commas, semicolons, and so forth – have not always added their pauses and emphases throughout the history of the written word.
Many of the texts that we now read with ease gained these marks centuries after being written with no punctuation at all. Additionally, punctuation rules vary from language to language and culture to culture, so that immaculate grammar and stringent rule-following in English does not equate to a good grasp of Russian or Chinese punctuation. It took centuries for English to acquire its steadfast rules for punctuating texts. The Very Long History of Emoticons - Culture. I used to be anti-emoticon.
For years, I thought of smiley faces as the mark of an immature writer—the kind who punctuates a sentence with seven exclamation points. Then one day, after years of reading them, I was composing a sentence I wanted to make very sure the reader knew was a joke—and so I did it. Slowly, those little guys crept into my emails. I started becoming enamored of the more clever ones, and still cannot help but smile when I see the sad monkey face: (:@ A punctuation purist would claim that emoticons are debased ways to signal tone and voice, something a good writer should be able to indicate with words.
A Glimpse into the History of Punctuation.