Semicolons: How do you feel about them?

[lesyeuxverts]

Anyone who's suffered through one of my fics (long sentences, mostly punctuated with hyphens and commas, because I do tend to run on) or a beta from me (lots of strike-outs), might be aware of the fact that I hate the semicolon.

To be more precise, I prefer to confine its use to more formal writing. In short stories and fic, I avoid it with a passion that is otherwise reserved for adverbs.

This article from the New York Times is slowly steeping its way through the sleep-deprived, decaffeinated haze that is my brain right now, and I'm reconsidering the semicolon. There may be a time and place for it ... somewhere between caffeine and ethanol, I suppose.

As quoted in the article: “When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

What do you think?

Comments

[kabal42.insanejournal.com]

It's a lovely article. Mind, I do have the advantage of it being 4:23 pm just now ;-)

But, more importantly, I love semicolons. This may be because of my Danish upbringing where the definition of its use is slightly different (and more left to user discretion), but I love the added tool in my box that's, in my inappropriate lay terms "somewhere between a full stop and a comma".

*hefts sign saying ";!"*

[lesyeuxverts.insanejournal.com]

4:23 pm :P

Afternoons do not increase my coherency, oh no. There must be much, much, much, MUCH more caffeine for that to happen.

I'd no idea that it was used differently in Danish... what do you mean, left more to user discretion? How do you use it, then?

[kabal42.insanejournal.com]

Heeh!

Grammar is very different in Danish. First of all, commas are placed strictly after sentence rules in that you have a comma when you have a sentence with a noun and a verb. (Example: "I went for a walk, and I saw a duck." The comma is placed because we have "I went" in one half and "I saw" in the other.) We use many more commas than in English.

As for semicolons, they're placed where one feels the pause needs to be a bit longer, but otherwise exactly as a comma. There are no specific rules for it that I know of.

[lesyeuxverts.insanejournal.com]

Huh ... cool. That's really interesting ... I hadn't really thought about other uses of punctuation, although clearly I should have. :)

[kabal42.insanejournal.com]

:-) Punctuation differs as much as other aspects of languages. Take it from someone who's fluent in three and semi-fluent in one more and knows bits of another two. (And believe me, that gets confusing sometimes! *G*)

I think it never occurred to me that it could be similar. Which, when you think about it, is a rather silly thing. Because why shouldn't it be? It would be a lot easier...

[ishtar79.insanejournal.com]

I can't actually recall a fic where I've seen it overused, or even used for that matter.

But yeah, I imagine it could be distractive. More so for me, because ';' is the symbol we use as a question mark in Greek. *g*

[lesyeuxverts.insanejournal.com]

I had no idea that it was a question mark in Greek! That's fascinating ... are any of the other punctuation marks different?

[ishtar79.insanejournal.com]

Off the top of my head, just that one. I have messed up and used "?" when writing in Greek more than a few times myself.

[felaine.insanejournal.com]

I like semicolons and use then a lot. Possibly that is because I'm as old as dirt and that's how we were taught back in the 1700s, er..1950s.
Felaine

[lesyeuxverts.insanejournal.com]

LOL ... but hmm, I'd never thought about that. The teaching of them has obviously changed over the years, so that makes a lot of sense. :)

[gingertart50.insanejournal.com]

I think that is right - although speaking as an advocate of the blunderbuss style of punctuation (stuff loads of commas, hyphens, colons, semi-colons and full stops into a gun and fire at the page) I'm hardly one to talk. In sentence fragments. Too. Hah!

[celandineb.insanejournal.com]

I rather like semicolons; I have often had a tendency to overuse them and therefore work hard not to, especially in fiction.

And psst -- angela_snape requested a giftlet for you! It's here: Overtime (http://asylums.insanejournal.com/cels_fic_haven/91444.html)

[lesyeuxverts.insanejournal.com]

eee! I'll surely never think of semicolons now, hehe! Thank you! :D

[sev1970.insanejournal.com]

What an interesting article. I love using semicolons and am saddened that people use them so infrequently these days. Shorter sentences look choppy to me and the use of such sentence structure is one of those things in fan fics and in reading in general that tends to turn me off.

[lesyeuxverts.insanejournal.com]

Oh, I love love LOVE long sentences, don't get me wrong ... I'm just not a huge fan of the semi-colon. There are so many other options, though - the dash, the comma, the compound sentence - that life is really quite happy without semi-colons, at least for me. :)

[sev1970.insanejournal.com]

Oh yes, I definitely employ the use of the colon and hyphen just as much as I do the semicolon.

[theentwife.insanejournal.com]

As you know, I'm quite fond of the dash but rather semicolon-phobic. And yay for loooooong compound sentences, with multiple clauses! :D


Persephone

[maireadinish.insanejournal.com]

I personally am a huge fan of the semicolon; it has to be used correctly though. ;-)

[maireadinish.insanejournal.com]

Now that I think about it a bit more though, I think that punctuation is taught less and less in school. A friend of mine (who is an English teacher) said that she has no idea how to use a semicolon. They just weren't taught punctuation at all in Australia. But I don't know if that's true everywhere.

[angela_snape.insanejournal.com]

I know in Canada, where I am, there was a big period of time where grammar wasn't taught at all - it was "whole language" (which didn't work). They've only just gone back to teaching grammar the last few years.

[maireadinish.insanejournal.com]

I know that in Pennsylvania, I was explicitly taught most punctuation in elementary school. However, I didn't learn how to use the semicolon until late high school and I was never taught the dash.
Most of my non-Pennysylvanian American friends told me that they had not been taught any grammar after about 3rd grade. I had grammar through 8th grade.

It certainly made things interesting once I got to my TESOL classes in grad school and had no idea what an interrogative was.

[angela_snape.insanejournal.com]

I usually only think of semi-colons when the grammar-checker tells me to use them. Even then, I may not use them. Mostly, I use them to wink in emails ;-)

[carpet_diemon.insanejournal.com]

Ehehe, that one made the rounds in my editorial group at work. I love the semicolon and use it ad nauseum. People sometimes think it's a bit pretentious, but really. A comma is a breath and a period is a full stop; we need the semicolon for that teetering place in the middle where you've slowed down considerably, but you're still going.

[fleurdeliser.insanejournal.com]

I've never really thought about semicolons one way or the other. I use them. I don't think about their usage. I lean towards fondness of them. But mostly because of ms_semicolon and I think they look kind of cool.