Punctuation is Important. Period.

Despite the constant disagreements to the rules of writing, punctuation is the foundation of all literature in any time period, and without it, the meaning and order of a certain prose or poem is lost.

Punctuation and writing go hand-in-hand: even if changing times call for a change in the rules of literature, punctuation will always be a prevalent player in any form of writing. Emily Dickinson, a revolutionary poet of America, used the dash in order emphasize certain words or phrases. Like in her poem "I dwell in Possibility--," which solely uses dashes, she separates phrases like "--for Doors--" (Source C) to show the symbolism in her poem and also to contrast the windows mentioned in the line before. Dickinson's dashes provided a feel that a period nor a comma can not; her specific use of the dash allowed for a completely different meaning to be interpreted. Also, in "Semicolons: A Love Story," Dolnick mentions William James uses the semicolon to keep the "'stream of thought from appearing... as a wild torrent" (Source E). Because of punctuation, order is kept. As periods and commas supplied this order before, semicolons did the same for William James, showing the change in times but the same applicability of different punctuation marks. Despite these examples, people say that punctuation gives up creativity for "more precision and exactitude" (Source D). For Elizabeth Austen in her poem "On Punctuation," she is against the "dogma of the period" (Source B), flowing every line together in one stream and in essence, proclaiming her creativeness--her style--for her lack of punctuation, but this is not the case for other writers. Andrea Gibson uses Twitter as a "testing ground for her more developed writings"  (Source F). Posting only a few words, she uses Twitter to get feedback and later incorporates it into her poetry, where a single punctuation mark "is enough to destroy the whole work" (Source D). This signifies that, yes, punctuation can have its limits in writing, but it can also have its own beauty in a concise manner. In all, literature is built upon punctuation, the figurative foundation of literature; every comma, period, semicolon, or dash carries its own meaning and has a everlasting importance in the unity and message of a piece of writing.