Thoughts on the Semi-colon

(A college friend asked for my thoughts on the semi-colon, and I was happy to throw out some)

I made screenshots of Bryan Garner’s Modern English Usage about semicolons. 

Conventions for punctuations change with each generation. When editing that Clay Reynolds interview, I noticed that he punctuated things very strangely. In fact, he had taught English grammar and punctuation at the college level for over a decade and read all sorts of grammar books while pursuing his Phd. He used lots of commas and runon sentences throughout the interview. True, he died before he could go over everything again (and so a certain number of these anomalies were simply errors), but I was aware that he viewed punctuation and sentence length much differently than I did. Although he used  semi-colons, he didn’t use many of them, preferring instead to make lots of commas (which I try to avoid doing). 

He also used Oxford commas (i.e., putting a final comma in a list of items), so that meant more commas in his text. I tend not to use the Oxford comma; that’s just the way I had learned it in high school and saw no reason to change even though I recognized that sometimes it made sentences seem ambiguous (and I had to be careful about that). So I was more prone to use semicolons.

(Lately I’ve been using the Oxford comma more often and have noticed that it allows for more variety in sentence structure, which may or may not be a good thing).

I love semi-colons, but I don’t use them that much. I also use parenthetical statements more than the average writer would.  I also use m/n dashes for certain long sentences.

I went over some recent writing of mine (both fiction and nonfiction) and found fewer semicolons than I would have thought.  Often I use  parentheses and m/n dashes  instead to  relieve the strain of overly long sentences.

EXAMPLE: I like semi-colons; on the few occasions when it’s necessary to use them, I sometimes resort to parentheses (but only if the thought  inside the parentheses is simple).

(NOTE: I really like starting out a sentence with a short statement such as “I like semi-colons;” and then continuing the thought. Also, at the end, I could have also used an m dash instead of the parenthesis).

With the example, I could have easily put a period there instead of a semi-colon, but I thought it deserved to be one continuous thought. Formal writing tends to avoid sentence fragments, but sometimes a fragment can convey meaning effectively.

When reading aloud, it should be easy to know when to breathe. A semi-colon makes that easy. Good sentences should be light and fluffy and occasionally strange. Although it’s true that semi-colons can result in longer sentences, the semi-colon can relieve the overall burden of breathing/reading  without making the flow of sentences seem too staccato.  

Horray for semi-colons! I see no reason to avoid them unless they make your sentences too long. Also, I would try to avoid using semicolons more than once in a single paragraph if you can help it.

Some authors of the past have used  multiple  semi-colons  and parenthetical statements in a single sentence to convey long-winded things (I’m looking at you, Faulkner and Proust!) These techniques can work up to a point. I loved reading Proust with all his twists and turns and cascade of mental associations, but found Faulkner’s prose in Absalom, Absalom to be absolutely insufferable. In contemporary times, I don’t think you could get away with that anymore (you don’t want people switching to social media in the middle of an interminable sentence!)

As I mentioned, my arsenal currently  includes a mixture of semi-colons, parentheses, and  m dashes when trying to convey a longer thought. But that introduces all sorts of punctuation complexities. Semi-colons generally belong outside the quotation marks even if it looks strange. Occasionally, just to avoid having to deal with a tangle of punctuation rules, I will  iron the whole thing out into multiple sentences  even if it ends up making me sound like a dufus.