Higher Orders of Punctuation

With respect to the punctuation of qualifiers, a comma (or a pair of commas) is used to set off certain types of qualifiers, namely, nonrestrictive qualifiers. Some situations - such as when one nonrestrictive qualifier is nested within another nonrestrictive qualifier - a higher order of punctuation may be necessary to avoid confusion. There, a dash was used for this purpose. This chapter explores other higher orders of punctuation. There is no need to formulate a rule with respect to the correspondence between type of punctuation and order of punctuation. However, good technical writing maintains a consistency of use within a given document. The chapter presents some examples that illustrate the use of a higher order of punctuation to set off an interior nonrestrictive qualifier that contains a list. For completeness, it presents examples where dashes and/or parentheses may be used as the first order of punctuation, rather than commas.