Why do some writers dislike a punctuation mark with such passion? To put it aside is to limit by choice the ways in which you can express yourself, which makes no sense
“There is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks. The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic cadence. Exclamation points are like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like musical upbeats, colons dominant seventh chords; and only a person who can perceive the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form can really feel the distinction between the comma and the semicolon.”
Thank you for making this case. I am definitely a fan of the semi-colon. If some writers choose to avoid them, that’s their business, but they’d better not come after mine.
Case in point: Kate Atkinson is an author I’ve loved ever since I first read Human Croquet. But when I picked up a paperback copy of Shrines of Gaiety I had the unmistakable impression that someone had been through the text and simply replaced every semi-colon with a comma. The result was ugly sentences which sat badly with the elegance of the rest of her prose. This is not the way to do it; if you’re going to avoid semi-colons, you have to write some sentences differently. This just looked like a find-and-replace job, which is clumsy editing.
Besides, Ursula K Le Guin loved semi-colons and that’s a clincher for me.
A semi-colon is a breath, a pause for thought. As Aldo Manuzio intended, it adds elegance and space to any discourse - something that few modern politicians recognise as a virtue, and even fewer use.
Semi-colons are so tasty that I tend to overdo them; my final versions always have fewer than my drafts. A little bit showy, to be kept for special occasions. On the other hand, I had one editor who replaced every one of them with commas, to gruesome effect.
I do have a prejudice though against using brackets in more formal prose - fine in magazines and online but not in a printed book.
I still use semi-colons when writing. I like them and think that select committee chair was wrong to make you remove them from your report. They are a pause in the correct place and I always read them as such....some people,eh!...I also like ellipses.
Adorno has a good essay on punctuation marks:
“There is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks. The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic cadence. Exclamation points are like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like musical upbeats, colons dominant seventh chords; and only a person who can perceive the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form can really feel the distinction between the comma and the semicolon.”
I've been enjoying noticing semi-colons more when I read. I try to assess why they're there. It brings added liveliness to my reading.
Thank you for making this case. I am definitely a fan of the semi-colon. If some writers choose to avoid them, that’s their business, but they’d better not come after mine.
Case in point: Kate Atkinson is an author I’ve loved ever since I first read Human Croquet. But when I picked up a paperback copy of Shrines of Gaiety I had the unmistakable impression that someone had been through the text and simply replaced every semi-colon with a comma. The result was ugly sentences which sat badly with the elegance of the rest of her prose. This is not the way to do it; if you’re going to avoid semi-colons, you have to write some sentences differently. This just looked like a find-and-replace job, which is clumsy editing.
Besides, Ursula K Le Guin loved semi-colons and that’s a clincher for me.
Semi colon is very useful to separate items in a list, where some of the items themselves contain commas.
I use them for that purpose, so that is kosher?
I would say in the case of a complex list, yes, ideal.
A semi-colon is a breath, a pause for thought. As Aldo Manuzio intended, it adds elegance and space to any discourse - something that few modern politicians recognise as a virtue, and even fewer use.
Terrific! From another fan of the semi-colon [though deploy it sparingly, on special occasions ;-) ]
Semi-colons are so tasty that I tend to overdo them; my final versions always have fewer than my drafts. A little bit showy, to be kept for special occasions. On the other hand, I had one editor who replaced every one of them with commas, to gruesome effect.
I do have a prejudice though against using brackets in more formal prose - fine in magazines and online but not in a printed book.
I still use semi-colons when writing. I like them and think that select committee chair was wrong to make you remove them from your report. They are a pause in the correct place and I always read them as such....some people,eh!...I also like ellipses.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was Vonnegut’s quote, awesome you included it! Great piece!
Controversial!