It’s an author’s words, rather than their punctuation, that we think of as defining their style. But as Adam J. Calhoun found out this week, the periods, colons, semicolons, and commas a writer uses can have just as much impact on their output as their choice of language. In a Medium post, Calhoun stripped the words out of some of his favorite books, leaving them as streams of pure punctuation. The results showed a stark contrast between the way authors use the tools in their texts, with some exhibiting a preference for dialogue, some using commas and semicolons to construct breathless sentences, and some making almost exclusive use of the most common marks to tell their stories.