The rules of punctuation seem arbitrary. How can they not, when an apostrophe looks like nothing in this world so much as a comma that can’t keep its feet on the ground? Or when, by simply placing next to that wafting comma its twin, one creates (of all things) a quotation mark? – Richard Lederer and John Shore, Comma Sense: A Fun-damental Guide to Punctuation

The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid. – Edgar Allan Poe

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim. – E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White

Among the losses punctuation suffers through the decay of language is the slash mark or diagonal… – Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), “Punctuation Marks,” Notes to Literature, V