  A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is
presented for written texts: {\it Alice in wonderland} and {\it Through a
looking glass}. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also
considered as a test for the role of punctuation in defining a style, and for
contrasting natural and artificial, but written, languages. Several log-log
plots of the sentence length-rank relationship are presented for the major
punctuation marks. Different power laws are observed with characteristic
exponents. The exponent can take a value much less than unity ($ca.$ 0.50 or
0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. The texts are also mapped into
time series based on the word frequencies. The quantitative differences between
the original and translated texts are very minutes, at the exponent level. It
is argued that sentences seem to be more reliable than word distributions in
discussing an author style.
