Even if they aren’t the basis by which we read and write, punctuation rules can’t just be unthought as though they never existed in the first place. We could not (and perhaps would not want to) go back to a time before there were punctuation rules. But maybe we can think beyond them now, to develop a new, more functional, more ethical philosophy of punctuation: one that would support a richer way of learning, teaching, using, and loving language. At the very least, by reflecting on the history of the commas, colons, question marks, and semicolons that dot our written language, we can gain some
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