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Florence Hazrat

Biography

Florence Hazrat

Florence Hazrat is a researcher and writer, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history and culture of punctuation. The author of AN ADMIRABLE POINT and ON THE MARK, she has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post and Aeon. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of St. Andrews.

Florence Hazrat

Books by Florence Hazrat

On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World
by Florence Hazrat - History, Language Arts, Nonfiction

You know the lively exclamation mark, the controversial semicolon, and the often-omitted apostrophe. But would you recognize a percontation point? How about an obelus? In ON THE MARK, Florence Hazrat argues that all punctuation marks, from the most forgotten to the most ubiquitous, are worthy of our attention. After all, the history of punctuation is the history of humankind. The first punctuation mark was a triangular symbol pressed into clay somewhere in Mesopotamia. Spaces between words were unknown for millennia, until a group of Irish monks pioneered them in the eighth century. Across ages and cultures, amid technological revolutions and radical changes in communication, these dots and dashes have reshaped the societies that created them.