Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life. Cecelia Watson

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Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life - Cecelia Watson

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to me,’ confessed Paul Robinson in a New Republic essay, ‘that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.’ When Robinson, a humanities professor at Stanford, sees a dot balanced over a comma, he’s filled with ‘exasperation’. Robinson is perhaps the semicolon’s most devoted foe, but he’s hardly its only modern detractor. Novelists from George Orwell to Donald Barthelme have held forth on its ugliness, or irrelevance, or both. Kurt Vonnegut advised omitting them entirely, accusing them of ‘representing absolutely nothing. All they do,’ he admonished writers, ‘is show you’ve been to college.’ And almost 800,000 people have shared a web comic that labels the semicolon ‘the most feared punctuation mark on earth’. Yet when the Italian humanists invented the semicolon in the fifteenth century, they conceived of it as an aid to clarity, not (as Professor Robinson now characterises it) a ‘pretentious’ mark used chiefly to ‘gloss over an imprecise thought’. In the late 1800s, the semicolon was downright trendy, its frequency of use far outstripping that of one of its relatives, the colon. How did the semicolon, once regarded with admiration, come to seem so offensive, so unwieldy, to so many people?

      Yet what Campbell and most of his contemporaries thought was a ‘preposterous’ idea soon became a commonplace principle: as the 1700s drew to a close, new grammar books began to espouse systems of rules that were purportedly derived from logic. In these new books, grammarians didn’t hesitate to impugn the grammar of writers traditionally considered superb stylists: Milton and Shakespeare were chastised for ‘gross mistakes’, and subjected to grammarians’ emendations, so that these great authors’ works were made to fall in line with rules established centuries after their deaths.

      The story of the semicolon told in these pages follows a chronological path, charting its transformation from a mark designed to create clarity to a mark destined to create confusion. The events described here epitomise the major steps in the life of the semicolon: they show how it was transformed over time, and what was important about those transformations. That importance lies in the semicolon’s ability to symbolise and trigger ideas and emotions that transcend the punctuation mark itself. The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink.

      I wouldn’t deny that there’s joy in knowing a set of grammar rules; there is always joy in mastery of some branch of knowledge. But there is much more joy in becoming a reader who can understand and explain how it is that a punctuation mark can create meaning in language that goes beyond just delineating the logical structure of a sentence. Great punctuation can create music, paint a picture, or conjure emotions. This book will show you how the semicolon is essential to the effectiveness and aesthetic appeal of passages from Herman Melville, Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Irvine Welsh, Rebecca Solnit, and other masters of English fiction and non-fiction. Looking at these authors, we will see beautiful uses of the semicolon that cannot be adequately encapsulated in grammarians’ rules, nor explained simply as a ‘breaking’ of those rules.

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