I have never seen the need for the semicolon. It seems to me that using a period in place of a semicolon never takes away from the clarity of the passage and has the added advantage of increasing readability. Yes, I know it is meant to bind together two independent clauses in a way a period supposedly doesn’t, but can you really force that kind of connection with punctuation? Using a semicolon strikes me as very similar to using an exclamation mark to force a sentence to have a meaning that shouldn’t need to be forced.
Maybe my aversion to the semicolon is due to the fact that I came of age when the semicolon was falling out of fashion, so they appear alien and distracting to me. Or maybe I just don’t do read or write enough to pick up on its subtleties. Whatever the case may be, I’m still open to giving the semicolon a second chance, provided someone can give some examples of semicolon usage that obviously enhance clarity or readability.
Three sorts of people habitually use semicolons: pretentious writers, who feel it makes their work appear more intellectual; typists who are intoxicated, sleep-deprived, or simply dull-witted, who consistently miss the period key on their keyboards; and I forget the third kind.
I dunno. I like the things, but no more than I like commas, colons, or anything else. I don’t worry too much about strict grammatical rules, and use them when they seem right. A stronger break than a comma, and a weaker one than a full stop/period. I think there’s a workaday place for the semicolon that has nothig to do with the way they are used by pretentious wankers.
I never used to use semicolons, because I didn’t know where they should go. I also think I probably never wrote anything that required one anyway. But since learning where they’re supposed to be placed, I have started to recognise those situations more and add them where I am sure they ought to be.
However, I have recently been reading some books by Naomi Novik, and she uses semicolons more often than anybody I have ever seen - usually five or six per paragraph - and it got very distracting, very quickly.
I wonder if I should’ve used a semicolon anywhere in this post. Perhaps instead of the dashes (which out to have been em-dashes and not hyphens (or minus signs), but I’ve never seen the need for two kinds of dash).
I used to “float,” which is to say that the school didn’t have a room for me so I taught different classes in different rooms.
I was in an English room one day and the teacher had posters all around with the usual English stuff. I noticed one: comper. Huh? It’s another name for a semi-colon, com(ma)per(iod). I can’t find “comper” on line for some reason.
I thought that was a good descripton of a semicolon, though. It seems to tell you to slow AND stop (but not completely) somehow.
Yes! In fact we need even more granularity than that.
How about the Indefinite Period for something that doesn’t require a period but needs more than a semicolon. It can be made from a dash and a comma.
Then we need the Seguecolon for those times when we need less of a pause than a semicolon calls for but more than a comma. That would be composed of a tilde and a comma.
That’s right, WordMan, we Iowa-folk dun take kindly to ambiguous punctuation.
And I know your comment was in jest, but I feel obligated to point out the University of Iowa is home to the prestigious graduate Writer’s Workshop which has produced many Pulitzer Prize winners. So we’re a pretty literate bunch, I like to think. Or at least those of us in and around Iowa City.
And Patty O’Furniture points out something important. It’s a bit of a slippery-slope, isn’t it? If we allow the semicolon, why stop there? Why not quantify the amount of connection with a “connectedness parameter” as a subscript: A weak connection would be “;[SUB]0.1[/SUB]” and a stronger connection would be “;[SUB]0.8[/SUB]”. Now that’s clarity!
I think semicolons have more elegance than a full stop- its more like a little jump. As someone highly concerned with the poetry of a sentence, sometimes a semicolor can make a nice difference in flow.
I used to dislike them, but then I saw some clever uses of them and realized that I probably disliked them because I didn’t really know how to use them. Now that I know, I find myself using them more and more.
My pet peeve- can you believe it (of course you can; you all are pretty imaginative)- might be overuse of parenthical, that is, superflous, statements.
Oh sure - absolutely. I have a friend who attended there, and another friend from Grinnell who is a reasonably big deal at the NY Times. Iowans can write - but apparently with very few not-quite-full pauses along the way!
As a graduate student working on an English MA, I write several literary criticism papers every semester. The semi-colon is only one of the valuable punctuation tools I use for clarity of meaning. There are definite rules of punctuation in scholarly writing and I follow them faithfully. I also get As (not A’s) on nearly all of my papers.
