I enjoy writing, but I have long felt that the punctuation marks we have available just aren’t robust enough.  For me, I really struggle with things like sarcasm and questions asked in excited or emphatic ways.  In fact, I often find myself using self-made tags or punctuation in my sentences.  With sarcasm, I will surround my text with <sarcasm> tags </sarcasm>.  If I feel a question needs emphasis, I use a “?!” or “!?”.  Don’t you?!

Imagine my happiness when I saw an article on Uncommon Punctuation Marks.  It seems that French writer Hervé Bazin felt the same way, and proposed several new punctuation marks in an essay in 1996 titled, “Plumons l’Oiseau.”  It seems Hervé and I have a lot in common.  Though I don’t agree with all the marks in the article, I do agree with all of them attributed to Hervé, though the “Love Point” is my least favorite of his.  The marks not attributed to Hervé are not as enticing to me, except for numbers 7, 8, and 12.  In fact, numbers 2 and 6 could just be removed, as far as I am concerned.

What do you think?  Are there others marks that make sense?  Do you ever find punctuation lacking when you are communicating?  If one or more of these marks were available on your keyboard, would you use them?