The tendencies of Byzantine authors and scribes with regard to punctuation, orthography or accentuation, based on such trustworthy witnesses as an autograph, a copy corrected or dictated by the author himself, have been the subject of individual analyses or integrated into editions. Yet, modern editors still waver between their normalization and their adoption. On the one hand, this diversity in editorial principles points to the need for a systematic study of authorial and scribal habits and their evolution throughout the Byzantine period. On the other, an ever more urgent issue is how the results of such a study would affect textual criticism and editing techniques. The observations outlined below apply to literary texts, written in prose and in learned language.