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Lucas Baptista's avatar

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.”

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Pipsqueak's avatar

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.

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Jon Sparks's avatar

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.

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Simon Cox's avatar

Semi colon is very useful to separate items in a list, where some of the items themselves contain commas.

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Michael A Alexander's avatar

I use them for that purpose, so that is kosher?

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Eliot Wilson's avatar

I would say in the case of a complex list, yes, ideal.

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Ellie Rose Elliott's avatar

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.

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James Strock's avatar

Terrific! From another fan of the semi-colon [though deploy it sparingly, on special occasions ;-) ]

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Ronald Turnbull's avatar

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.

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Julie Hogg's avatar

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.

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Rosco Fletcher's avatar

The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was Vonnegut’s quote, awesome you included it! Great piece!

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Dave Hill's avatar

Controversial!

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