Punctuation. Are there rules? Or is it a matter of personal style?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090205.wkoringdiscussion0205/BNStory/International/home

" 'We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy,' " he said recently in a sharp and sweeping contrast to his predecessor."

Wow. I took me a while to parse that in my head.
Nestled punctuation, indeed!

From Wikipedia:

Usage

Quotations and speech

Single or double quotation marks denote either speech or a quotation. Neither style – single or double – is an absolute rule, though double quotation marks are preferred in the United States, and both single and double quotation marks are used in the United Kingdom. A publisher’s or even an author’s style may take precedence over national general preferences.

Oh, the irony! The same day in the same paper has the following article too.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090204.wrussell0205/BNStory/Entertainment/home

Punctuation as ideological warfare

According to Truss's book, punctuation seems to have between 3 and 8 functions per symbol.
In the strictest sense, more like 3 to 5.
I would like to supplement the HIOXian letter system with revised punctuation.
It simply provides the option to overtly indicate via modified diacritic which function a punctuation symbol is fulfilling.
One can just use a comma. Or one can indicate the comma is indicating a list.

Hioxian punctuation will also be clearly left-and-right pairs for various symbols, such as parantheses and quotation marks. Keep in mind that no HIOXian figure uses any element smaller than a bar segment. There are no 'dots'. Dots are easy to miss, being tiny. I suspect
half the reason folks are using more dashes these days is for visual clarity.

. ; : , - - - -

As the Baby Boomers age, visual clarity for reading a computer display will matter more.

I personally use a nifty Firefox plug-in called Image Zoom.

One can increase text size via Control + mouse scroll wheel.
Oddly, my WinXP changes font size but Macs simply zoom as if the text is an image.
The result on a Mac is a large but fuzzy letter. Not much better...


I really do need to attach some tabs to key passages in her book.
Her humour and wit was much appreciated.
Gawd, she'd HATE my blog, LOL.