Premise

Why? Who Cares?

Consider the idea that “advanced punctuation” is merely using enhanced punctuation techniques to more accurately and illustratively translate your thoughts from your mind out into the world. Sure, you can always just throw in semicolons, em dashes, and parentheses into your writing to make it look spicier. But the whole point of adding these elements is to enhance the nuance of how you want audiences to perceive your tone, pacing, and synthesis of information. In short, how they perceive how you perceive things.

Simply put: if you want to really, finally understand what advanced punctuation is—and how it works—just take the half an hour or so to actually and fully read through these explanations and examples! Thirty minutes is a fair tradeoff for a lifetime of understanding ideas and expressing them much more effectively!

Okay, Fine, I’ll read: So What the Heck is “Advanced Punctuation” Exactly?

Advanced Punctuation is punctuation that serves to add a particular emphasis or distinction to your sentences in one or more of the following ways. Consider these effects:

1. Emphasis of Tone

You can greatly emphasize the “tone” of a sentence through certain advanced punctuation. Just look at these two sentences side-by-side:

“Be here by 8:30.” or “Be here by 8:30!”

Changes: Italicizing the word “by” in this example serves to emphasize the importance by which you need to arrive—as does adding the exclamation point! 

Note that italicizing keywords for emphasis can have lots of other effects, which are relative to the context of the sentence. E.g. “I hate our current mayor,” sounds inherently less emphatic than, “I hate our current mayor.” The latter example expresses that you “really hate” the current major, without outright stating it that way.

2. Definition of Ideas

You can very much influence the “definition” of an idea through certain advanced punctuation. Just look at these two sentences side-by-side:

“I’m sorry you’re my friend.” or “I’m sorry; you’re my friend.”

Changes: By adding a semicolon, you’re clarifying the meaning of the sentence. In the first example, the statement reads as if you’re saying that “I am sorry that you are my friend,” implying that you rather the person not be your friend.

In the second example, however, you’re clarifying a contrast via separating these statements, yet still linking a strong reflective meaning between them via semicolons. I.e. “I am sorry [for something that I did to you]; I am sorry because you are indeed my friend.”

3. Regulation of Pacing

You can also regulate the progression and importance of ideas more clearly. Just look at these two sentences side-by-side:

Over time, we see how students are still impacted by sleep deprivation throughout their college days, and Tara’s example is perfect because we get to hear a modern and relatively recent point of view from a college student who entered this new chapter during a global pandemic, which not only messed up how academic systems worked, and work now, but the world in general is still recovering from the economical, social, and political effects of this deadly outbreak.

or

Over time, we see how students are still impacted by sleep deprivation throughout their college days. Tara’s example is perfect because we get to hear a modern and relatively recent point of view from a college student who entered this new chapter during a global pandemic—which not only messed up how academic systems worked (and work now), but the world in general is still recovering from the economical, social, and political effects of this deadly outbreak.

There are lots of other ways and specific techniques to use, but these are the major effects in terms of why it’s well worth learning how and why advanced punctuation can really enrich your expression personally and professionally! Moving on, we’ll look at some of these tools.

Sources of Frustration

If you—like many other students—hate writing, one of the reasons probably stems from the lack of meaningful comments from teachers over the years, like “Use more punctuation!” But what in the world does that mean, and perhaps even more importantly, why?

Punctuation is often taught as “right” or “wrong.” But that’s just the start of its purpose. Obviously, having clear and correct punctuation is useful in order to identify sentence-level ideas if you dont like you can see that im doing midway through this sentence now it becomes very distracting at least and probably eventually confusing the more I runon in this sentence without regulating the pacing of ideas through periods apostrophes commas etc you get the idea see what I mean?

Okay, that was probably torturous to read—but that’s the point! Making sure to throw all of those aforementioned punctuations in, is, at the very least, what you want to do. But then, how do you decide which ones to choose from when you have options?

Examples

Okay, Then What Are My Options?

When we talk about types of advanced punctuation, we’re usually talking about tools that do more than just our most common friends: commas and periods. There are a ton of punctuation marks that you can use to your emphasizing advantage. Some of these you may already be well familiar with, like exclamation points! But there are plenty of others that you’ve likely seen—and maybe even have felt the effects of—even if you’re not sure how to employ them yourself.

Here’s a list of several of the most common (and potentially effective) advanced punctuation tools you can use:

Parentheses:

Used to insert referential or clarifying information. This is why you see parentheses for citations too. The citation doesn’t usually impact the meaning of a sentence, but it does identify for us who the source is. But again, parentheses can also be used to provide clarifying information (i.e. not as a Works Cited entry) that we feel like is simply useful to more clearly understand a point being made. This extra information doesn’t really add any commentary.

Example:

No advanced punctuation: “The artists who received the award, Bob Ross and Childish Gambino, are probably the most popularly known as well.”

Advanced punctuation: “The artists who received the award (Bob Ross and Childish Gambino) are probably the most popularly known as well.”

Effect: Either example is technically “correct.” But the latter one using parenthesis as a form of advanced punctuation serves to make the information appear more “referential.” I.e. It’s still important information, but it’s not as important as the main point of the sentence. 

Note: this why it’s so important to make sure that you format citations correctly. You don’t want your readers to confuse advanced punctuation like we see here above with an information citation such as used with MLA, APA, etc.

Example:

No advanced punctuation: “The governor, who previously served as the state attorney general, vetoed the police reform bill as his first act in office.”

Advanced punctuation: “The governor (previously the state attorney general) vetoed the police reform bill as his first act in office.”

Effect: The second example with advanced punctuation sounds more like just adding the clarification in for reference. I.e. “just so you’re aware,” in case this detail is important for a technical or logistical understanding of the subject matter.

Em dashes:

Are used to insert non-essential clauses within sentences or add extra commentary at the end of complete sentences. I.e. whereas the parenthesis example above just identifies or clarifies referential information, the em dashes here are used more often to highlight an important point of relevant commentary that impacts our inherent understanding of the value of the idea being expressed. You can choose this when you want a point of commentary or note of emphasis to really be brought out in what you’ve already written.

Example:

No advanced punctuation: “The monkeys, none of whom were related, showed a desire to share the same house all the same.”

Advanced punctuation: “The monkeys—none of whom were related—showed a desire to share the same house all the same.”

Effect: The commas in the first example make the information that “none of these monkeys were related” seem less important and more a part of the overall point of the sentence—whereas the em dash example literally adds space via the longer dash, to help “off set” this information visually, thus highlighting that this detail is special. Perhaps in the context of this example, you really want your reader to notice how strange it is that the result was what it was given that these monkeys weren’t related. Maybe you explain this context more in the next sentence(s), but you can still make that emphasis here in this way. This would be a perfect reason to use em dashes here.

Example:

No advanced punctuation: “Last week’s homework was among the more meaningless assignments he had done in college, at least so far since switching to Computer Science.”

Advanced punctuation: “Last week’s homework was among the more meaningless assignments he had done in college—at least so far since switching to Computer Science.”

Effect: Similar to the effect in the previous example, switching the comma to an em dash increases the emphasis of your commentary. In this case: the implication that “While this homework was indeed useless, he expects there to be much more useless homeworks after switching to computer science.”

Italics:

Are used to highlight keywords for emphasis. This emphasis can manifest in many ways depending upon the context of the situation.

Example:

No advanced punctuation: “He didn’t think that the move was that bad.”

Advanced punctuation: “He didn’t think that the move was that bad.”

Effect: The impact here should be really clear. Italicizing the word “that” can have various contextual effects. It seems the most likely potential one might be something like the idea that “He thought that the movie was bad. However, he did not think that it was as bad as others have expressed.” See how you can relate all of this context though by just italicizing a keyword instead?

Example:

No advanced punctuation: “These people are just like you and me.”

Advanced punctuation: “These people are just like you and me.”

Effect: Obviously, the emphasis here seems to be a commentative one in regards to the idea that whoever these people are, they really are very much like the speakers. Again, italicizing this keyword of emphasis though relates this connotation without the need for extraneous explanation.

Okay, Then What Are Some Examples in Action?

Good question! Let’s look at an example: one with no advanced punctuation, and then the same one but with lots added in.

The article’s author, James Clarence, is certainly well-meaning, but he doesn’t seem to care much about offering an alternative viewpoint. Readers who don’t already agree with him, especially those who feel very strongly the opposite, might even be offended by his lack of care in this regard. Yet he certainly shows why passionate pleas matter. This is evident by the personal examples that he includes, but there’s definitely more to be done here, especially if he wants to appeal to a broader audience of college students.

Analytically, this paragraph appears just fine and peachy. But now let’s dazzle it up with some advanced punctuation—and without even switching any words or phrases around. Remember as you read these changes to consider how aspects of the a) Emphasis of Tone, b) Definition of Ideas, and, c) Regulation of Pacing are all impacted by these changes. We’ll even bold and highlight these changes in red so you can see them more clearly:

The article’s author (James Clarence) is certainly well-meaning, but he doesn’t seem to care much about offering an alternative viewpoint. Readers who don’t already agree with him—especially those who feel very strongly the opposite—might even be offended by his lack of care in this regard. Yet he certainly shows why passionate pleas matter; this is evident by the personal examples that he includes. But there’s definitely more to be done here—especially if he wants to appeal to a broader audience: college students.

Clearly, you can see a lot has been changed here. But why? Let’s go through line by line and see the effect of each particular change from our regular friend the “comma” to more advanced forms of punctuation.

• “The article’s author (James Clarence) is certainly well-meaning…”
  • Change: adding the parenthesis clarifies a mere technical detail. I.e. reminds us of the information about whom we are discussing.
• “Readers who don’t already agree with him—–especially those who feel very strongly the opposite—might even be offended by his lack of care in this regard.”
  • Change: inserts a clarification of an idea to emphasize the impact of analysis. In this case: which types of readers it’s important for us to know are the ones being affected.
• “Yet he certainly shows why passionate pleas matter; this is evident by the personal examples that he includes.”
  • Change: italicizes the word “matter” to emphasize that it “very much” matters. The semicolon also lines these ideas more closely to express how “true” and or “intimately related/reflected” these ideas are.
• “But there’s definitely more to be done here—especially if he wants to appeal to a broader audience: college students.”
  • Change: another em dash to add an impactful clause of commentary at the end of this sentence. But the colon is also used to introduce an idea to a “prompt.” I.e. If I write a sentence in a way that presents an “answer” to be given, you can give that answer at the end of the sentence with a colon to clearly identify it. E.g. “There’s only one thing I like more in the world than advanced punctuation: watching Quentin Tarantino movies while I’m working on such explanations.”

Further Considerations

Congratulations! If you’ve actually taken the time to read all these examples, then you’re well on your way to becoming an expert at using advanced punctuation. Go back to our main section on grammar and punctuation to check out how many of these ideas mentioned here—and more—can be used in further specific ways!