Two days after National Punctuation Day, we Mobyers have settled the most pressing question of the age: What is your favourite punctuation mark? See if you can guess which answer applies to which Moby writer:

I like the em-dash — because they look nice and my mum, a sometime copy-editor, told me never to use them.

The comma. It’s just so useful!! (also fond of unnecessary exclamation points)

I tend to favor the semicolon; when I get on a roll when I’m writing and start to ramble, it’s a good way to catch my breath and say, “oh, and another thing!”

Semicolon. Vonnegut once wrote that he’d never used one in his fiction, and that if an author was planning to use one they should just insert a period and have done with it. But I’m prone to broken thought fragments and I find the fucker invaluable. Or perhaps the oxford comma. I’d go to war for that one.

I appreciate a correctly used en dash in a range of numbers. But my favorite is the ampersand because there are so many interesting typographic variations. http://www.graphichug.com/?p=1294

The em dash. Its steady usage is new-ish, but it’s so amazingly versatile and flexible that it’s hard to beat. It can set off dialogue, separate seemingly related concepts, connect seemingly unrelated concepts, insert a breathy sound into prose or represent a break in sound entirely — it’s wonderful.

I actually appreciate how Nanni Balestrini demonstrates in SANDOKAN that no punctuation whatsoever is necessary. Meaning still makes it through. Except sometimes I want to put a comma in there. For clarity of reference!

I’ll throw my lot in with the lovers of the em dash, but also confess to having overcome, in recent years, a lifelong aversion to the exclamation mark. See other favourite exclamation marks at the Atlantic Wire.

What are your favourites?