Aristophanes of Byzantium needed to complete each fragment of text when reading aloud (not to comply with rules of grammar, which were not applied to punctuation marks until thousands of years later). For a short passage (a "komma"), a "stigmḕ mésē" dot was placed mid-level (·). This is the origin of the modern comma punctuation mark, and its name. For a longer passage (a "kolon"), a "hypostigmḗ" dot was placed level with the bottom of the text (.), similar to a modern colon or semicolon, and for very long pauses ("periodos"), a "stigmḕ teleía" point near the top of the line of text
Punctuation of English their cover letters. In contrast, closed punctuation uses commas and periods in a strict manner. Closed style is common in presentations, especially in bulleted and numbered lists. It is also frequently used in advertising, marketing materials, news headlines, and signage. The approximate average frequencies for English punctuation marks per 1000 words based on 723,000 words of assorted texts are as follows (as of 2013, but with some text corpora dating to 1998 and 1987): The apostrophe , (sometimes called inverted comma in British English) is used to mark possession as in ""John's book"", and to mark letters omitted in contractions,