[bitwize]

Virtually all punctuation marks started as prosody hints, indicating intonation and pauses, suggesting how the text is to be read aloud. In fact you can argue that this is still the case: it was only later that we invented grammatical structure rules for them, and even those are applied only in certain contexts like professional writing. In casual writing, we tend fall back to using punctuation as prosody markers, for example: "Worst. Episode. Ever."

[jessriedel]

Yes, reading a transcript without punctuation can give one a visceral sense of what drove its introduction.