Whatever happened to semicolons?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I didn’t mean to imply that I was replacing a semicolon, just that I was using the style I prefer.

This is my preference as well. Paragraphs should flow like music. Pizzicato may sometimes be effective. Such sentences are empathetic. Readers intake important information best when not wrapped in layers of padding. Yet most paragraphs do better if some sentences convey a proper and necessary amount of information, a complex thought that is like tonal richness, an orchestral blending of highs and lows: to break metaphors, a savory mouthful for the brain.

These threads break down into frustration because people conflate all the various modes of writing and want to prescribe one set of rules for them. Doing so is flatly wrong. Formal, academic writing has one set of rules. A newspaper story has another. A nonfiction book yet a third. Casual dialog on a message board can cut through many modes depending on context. “Grammatic complexity” and “idea density” may be useful in rare moments, and yet utterly repellent in other threads.

If the purpose is to convey information and do so in a way that will lead the reader gently to the end of a longish read, a good writer will adapt the components accordingly. If they have a singular rule-based style that can’t be broken they likely will force a gradual flight of readership somewhere in the middle. Tell me you’re never stopped partway through a piece because of the way it’s written.

42

Depends on the sex of the cat.

Semicolons aren’t dead; I use them often.

43

And also that most of what most of us read nowadays is short form and online. It’s a format that generally is aimed at a … general … audience, and that is typically best served by keeping it simple and to the point.

For myself, I have a writing voice and I just speak in it without thinking too hard about it. Yes, I recognize that I use semicolons sometimes, but that probably reflects what style was used in what I was reading when my writing voice was first forming. I am not usually bothering to belabor style and grammar choices for my typical needs. I am just happy when my post actually contains all the words that I meant to say instead of missing some key “not” or “other than”!

But I still appreciate reading posts written by those who write well without wasting time about it.

44

The first use of the semicolon (in any language) was in 1494. it slowly increased in use until this century. It has decreased in use since then.