We’ve probably all witnessed the havoc a misplaced comma can wreak on an innocent sentence. “Let’s eat, Grandma” and “Let’s eat Grandma” are one small mark apart, but only one of them sounds like a line from Hannibal Lecter.

But there’s another punctuation mishap we see all the time, on signs, menus, storefronts, packaging, you name it: the misuse of quotation marks . Somewhere along the way, people decided these little curls were a handy way to add emphasis. The problem? They do draw attention to the words inside them, but not in the way anyone intended. A bar advertising “happy” hour suddenly sounds a lot more depressing, while a deli promising “fresh” sandwiches has us thinking twice about ordering. There are plenty more where those came from, so keep scrolling.

Some might think punctuation marks are awfully small things to get worked up about, especially when texting seems to have made punctuation optional, at best. But as Louis Menand writes for The New Yorker, punctuation has evolved over centuries, “giving sentences rhythm, shape, and meaning.” And it turns out some of us still (over)think about punctuation a great deal. Morgan McMurrin explored this in a 2025 Parade article, even getting a psychologist to weigh in. And honestly? I’ve never felt more seen.

It helps to know I’m not the only one who’s written an email or message and then sat staring at it, agonizing over its punctuation. Does that sentence really warrant an exclamation point? Should I move it somewhere else? How many are too many? You don’t want to seem “overexcited,” as Nitsuh Abebe writes for The New York Times Magazine. But the alternative isn't necessarily safer: A plain old period can seem “too brusque. Too cold. Too testy.”

“It has been this way since soon after the smartphone arrived,” Abebe explains, “when older Americans started getting the unwelcome news that ending their messages with periods was a grave faux pas .” He goes on to describe a “new tonal consensus” in which the period came to seem “pointed, stern, passive-aggressive.” In other words, it had acquired a “newfound role as a jerk.”

Research suggests this perception can affect how we interpret messages. A 2015 study led by Binghamton University psychology professor Celia Klin found that text messages ending in a period were perceived as less friendly and sincere than those without one, as NPR reported. As Florence Hazrat, author of On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World , puts it in a quote cited by The New Yorker, “The polite way to be rude now is to use correct punctuation.”

The same punctuation mark one person uses to end a sentence without a second thought can leave someone else wondering whether they’ve done something wrong. As a result, as Abebe puts it, our anxieties about tone have “skipped right over the content of our messages to the characters that end them.” Suddenly, those tiny marks don’t seem so insignificant, do they?

Quotation marks bring their own set of complications and can leave readers wondering what a writer really means. June Casagrande, author of The Best Punctuation Book, Period. , touched on the issue in a column for the Los Angeles Times, noting that quotation marks are often misused, sometimes with comic effect. She also noted that single quotation marks—what she calls “quotation marks lite”—often escape the same scrutiny. “They are misused at least as often as regular quotation marks, probably more. But no one pays much attention, perhaps because these errors seem only about 50% as funny,” she says.