  Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through
some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em
dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic
signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself.
Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce
marvelously different (and visually striking) sequences. Punctuation is a
largely overlooked stylistic feature in "stylometry", the quantitative analysis
of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of
literary documents and ask the following questions: Are the properties of such
sequences a distinctive feature of different authors? Is it possible to
distinguish literary genres based on their punctuation sequences? Do the
punctuation styles of authors evolve over time? Are we on to something
interesting in trying to do stylometry without words, or are we full of sound
and fury (signifying nothing)?
