Punctuation Indicates How the Writer Hears the Prose

Punctuation…indicates how the writer hears the prose, as they create it. So I use ellipses, dashes and commas quite a lot, because they express how things sound to me. Exclamation marks convey moments of passionate overemphasis or profound disorder—like someone shouting in public or bursting into tears. So they make things briefly uncomfortable—and then we go on again.

JOANNA KAVENNA