Every once in a while, in a random book/manga on a random page, there is a word and on top of each syllable of the word (or to the side if it is vertical writing), there are a few dots. These dots mostly don't appear further in the book. And as far as I can't tell, they don't seem to mean anything.

I'm sure you've seen these dots yourself if you have opened up a reasonable amount of books.

What the hell are these dots?

They're for emphasis. Think of them as the Japanese version of underlining words.

Bokusenou Wrote:They're for emphasis. Think of them as the Japanese version of underlining words.

Not disbelieving you but do you have a source on that?

On the occasions I've seen this (if it's the same thing), it has been for emphasis, speaking each mora in a slow and detached way (and e.g. in a sultry voice!).

傍点 (ぼうてん)
(n) ① marks or dots used to emphasize text passage (emphasise). ② marks to facilitate reading of kanbun.

anotherjohn Wrote:On the occasions I've seen this (if it's the same thing), it has been for emphasis, speaking each mora in a slow and detached way (and e.g. in a sultry voice!).

Are you talking about this ・?

Using the sultry voice and slow mora example: だい・す・き! is something I've seen before. For example, a beautiful woman at a brothel saying it to a young man's first visit. ・ is also used to separate katakana words. In any case, if that's what you're talking about, then that's what I'm not talking about (I think).

The one I'm talking about is (for example):
・・・
大好き

or

大・
好・
き・

cb4960 Wrote:傍点 (ぼうてん)
(n) ① marks or dots used to emphasize text passage (emphasise). ② marks to facilitate reading of kanbun.

"Mystery" solved I guess. http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/圏点

Excitement is over, everyone can go home now.

Wow, for the first couple of posts I thought this was a troll thread referring to furigana as strange dots, as if the kanji mastery was so great that furigana was completely unnecessary and unknown.
Then I learned something new.

I've known about this for a while now, due to Denpa Kyoushi (one of those 'interesting at first then jumps the shark after getting popular' shounen manga series), which overuses this to a higher degree than I overuse grouping symbols in my posts. Reading with that kind of emphasis works well when used right, but
it's
actually
pretty
annoying
after
a
while
.
It's hard to not read it like that too; kind of like how it's hard to not look at furigana when it's there.