Author’s punctuation is not a violation of punctuation rules. In a broad sense, author’s signs are variable, alternative signs, the choice of which is determined by the semantic and stylistic features of the utterance. The author's punctuation considered in this way includes heterogeneous phenomena that are differentiated according to the degree of occasional character of punctuation-formalized semantic-stylistic variants. The unifying feature of these phenomena is the situation of the choice of the sign, i.e. an alternative of the variants. Author's marks in the narrow sense of the word are a means of creating occasional, irregular semantic-stylistic neologisms with the help of punctuation. As an analogy to the distinction between different types of punctuation-semantic variants, one can consider the division of metaphors into linguistic (including so-called speech metaphors) and individual, the author's ones. The criterion for differentiation after all is the degree of difficulty in the transferring from linguistic relations (the relations between verbal images) to the relations of figurative and conceptual, mental (the relations between “objective” images), i.e. the degree of familiarity, standardization, regularity of the meaning expressed by the metaphor.