Whole books—lots of them—have been written about punctuation, and I believe it would take an entire semester to teach writers all the ins and outs of parentheses, the slips and slides of slashes, hyperbolic reactions of the language mavens to simple hyphens.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon defines punctuation rhetorically: “What is it, after all, but another way of cutting up cutting up time, creating or negating relationships, telling words when to take a rest, when to get on with their relentless stories, when to catch their breath?”

Here is a brief primer on this confounding subject.

Whether you’re a floodgates-open writer or a blocked writer, remember: the first draft is for just getting the ideas down. It’s in the revising that we sift through our words, letting only the most perfect specimens adorn the thread of syntax. These “secrets of sinfully good prose” will help you banish the potatoes and burnish the pearls.

Most of us also sense we missed some lessons along the way. But few of us can claim Joan Didion’s ear. It can take years to master the nuances of syntax, but it doesn’t take long to learn a few critical basics.

Imagine a paragraph as a musical score with punctuation marks as the rests that tell us when, and how long, to pause. Think of the comma as an eighth rest, the colon as a quarter rest, the semi-colon a half rest, and the period a whole rest.