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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his own taste and judgment. This idea of punctuation as a matter of individual taste and style outlived the humanists: it stretched beyond the Latin texts that Manutius printed, crossing borders and oceans, and it survived as a way of thinking about the practice of punctuation well into the eighteenth century. When the topic of punctuation usage came up, a reader was likely to be advised that he should consider the punctuation marks analogous to rests in music, and deploy them according to the musical effect he wanted to achieve. How on earth did this idea of the writer as musician, which held on for hundreds of years, transform into our comparatively new expectation that writers must submit to rigid rules?

      * Back in the humanists’ day, the letters for a font were carved into steel bars. These were called ‘punches’. The technique was punch-cutting, and its practitioner a punch-cutter.

       In those days, it was usually a ‘him’, although there were of course exceptions.

       The Science of Semicolons

      English Grammar Wars

      Shakespeare and Milton, both very improper!

      * You will notice an odd typographical quirk in Lowth’s text: the ‘Medial S’, which looks to the modern eye like an f but is to be read as an s. The Medial S can lead to some unintentionally seedy reading in books that are reprinted in facsimile edition, like Antoine Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, which contains a long section in which the author describes sucking air through a tube for an experiment.

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