Idiosyncratic Punctuation And Formatting

Besides the formatting rules used in other latin-alphabet languages such as German, Spanish, and French, as explained in the Real Life section of 'Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma', I'd like to show you this little gem I found in Wikipedia: The Irony Mark, among others. It may or may not advantageously replace our Sarcasm Mode.

Speaking of writing at large, when is it a good idea to introduce such gimmicks and little pieces of fun, and how does one make them a fun and interesting addition to a story without distracting from the story itself?

I think doing that kinda stuff might make sense if it's used for world-building. Y'know — assume your universe has different spelling/punctuation conventions and pretend the book is from there (and in the book's universe it's non-fiction, or at least — not speculative fiction).

Of course that works best for fantasy, sci-fi or a mixture of both.

The relatively obscure Japanese anarchist poet Hagiwara Kyoujiro did some really fascinating things with punctuation and structure for example, in his poem "Raskolnikov"—one of his only works to appear stateside, sadly—he uses criss-crossing and shifting arrows to indicate the movement of perspective, representing objects through graphic/textual representations:

(win (win (win (win
dow) dow) dow) dow)

...is a passing train, for instance. (Admittedly, this sort of thing works better in kanji, but I think that you get the point.)

ME GUSTA

Only now am I learning how huge a deal punctuation is in the Written English Language, and I'm learning to wrap my head around the difference between that format and the freer oral forms.

It doesn't even seem like a matter of register; be it forum posts or political speeches, the implementation of pauses and the fragmentation of sentences is much freer than in the written format.

Apparently, attempting to write pauses exactly where they'd be pronounced if the thing were read aloud is distracting at best and infuriating at worst, depending on how attached the audience is to some rules. The same goes for starting sentences with "and", "but", sentence fragments, and so on.