What are punctuation marks for?

In our age of virtual communication, punctuation marksmany seem superfluous. Why bother with the arrangement of commas, quotes, dashes, if you can just put a smiley? And in general, what are the punctuation marks for? Do you know that all the famous graphic emoticons are also a combination of punctuation marks? Smiles were originally invented (and now used) to convey emotions on the letter. And this is also one of the functions of ordinary punctuation. What other functions do these signs do, which types are divided? Let's figure it out.

Types of punctuation marks

Punctuation marks are divided into two types: paired and single (unpaired). Paired:

two commas,
two dashes,
quotes,
brackets.

These punctuation marks are also prominent. They are used as a single sign to highlight the boundaries of a part of the text.

All other punctuation marks are single. This is the type of separating characters:

Exclamation point,
question mark,
dot,
dash,
semicolon,
colon,
ellipsis.

Functions of punctuation marks

According to the functional division, punctuation marks are:

Excretory. These are paired signs that highlight the semantic parts of the text: quotations, introductory constructions, direct speech. A question mark, an exclamation point, and a dot and an ellipsis highlight the end of the sentence.
Indicative. Point out the emotional attitude to certain phrases and words (quotes, as well as a question mark and exclamations in parentheses). The colon, comma, dash, and semicolon indicate the grammatical relationship of the sentence parts to each other. Ellipsis indicates skip text.
Reduction marks: a period, as well as a slash and a hyphen.
Separating. This is a special function performed by the red string and space. The space separates the words in the text. The red line is separate lines of text.

Other useful information on this topic can be found in the Punctuation section, as well as in our articles: