Punctuation marks are the unsung heroes of writing. Everybody uses them and whenever they do not it looks weird to see a sentence run on so long without any breaks.
Scientist and Princeton University researcher Adam J. Calhoun began wondering what his favorite books looked like without any words, just the periods, commas, colons, quotations, etc. So he created a code to do just that and stripped down several famous stories of all those wordy parts.
[seealso slug="uncommon-punctuation-marks"]
Here's a side-by-side, using that code, of just punctuation from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (left) and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (right). Notice how McCarthy seems to hate fancy stuff like quotation marks:
"I think writers are usually very aware of the punctuation that they use. Certainly McCarthy and Hemingway and Faulkner were," Calhoun told Mashable in an email. "Readers have a tendency to just glide on by. You might smile at an interesting word or a nice turn of phrase but who lingers over the perfect comma?!"
And just because it's cool, Calhoun put together some heatmaps to show how different punctuation marks can be in each book. See more in his Medium post.
"Periods and question marks and exclamation marks are red," Calhoun explained. "Commas and quotation marks are green. Semicolons and colons are blue."
Calhoun's code is available on Github, if you'd like to use it on your favorite books.