The Good, the Bad, and the Semicolon
I completed my novel and an editor friend graciously offered to assist me with formatting. As a former scientist, I am more familiar with technical or academic writing, so formatting fiction can be a challenge. My friend stripped out my semicolons and replaced most with a simple period. I asked why, was I using them inappropriately? I know they are used to separate independent but linking clauses, why make two short complete sentences when one will suffice? She laughed and said they are fine if you are a dead British writer, other than that they are used infrequently at best in modern fiction writing. Academics and technical writers are more prone to their usage by the nature of their writing.
This prompted me to do independent research to confirm her advice and I found this gem:
You are allowed one semicolon in your entire working life as a novelist. You can use more than that if you insist, but quite honestly you have a disease that should be treated and I refuse to be an enabler for you. https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/blog/2010/07/16/correctly-formatting-your-novel-manuscript/
Funny, but seriously? So I hunted a bit more then found Grammar Girl also has a great post on the usage of semicolons. She quotes no less of an authority than Kurt Vonnegut:
First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/vonneguts-famous-semicolon-advice-was-taken-out-of-context
Huh? Her article continues to explain that Vonnegut was engaged in hyperbole, but it remains vague if he actually shunned the usage of semicolons when he stated this:
He ends any lingering doubt when he uses a semicolon later in the essay and then writes,
*And there, I’ve just used a semicolon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules.
Are semicolons only allowed in technical or academic writing?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/31967. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Bollocks. (That's a technical term.) The semicolon is the correct punctuation for a particular kind of sentence structure. So on the face of it, if you want to outlaw something, it should be that sentence structure, not the punctuation that is necessary to it.
But this is one of those rules like kill all the adverbs. Many writers today do not give sufficient attention to the quality of their prose. They are all about getting their plot down on paper and are negligent of their prose and its effects. One of the most obvious ways this shows up is as the sloppy use of adverbs. But merely cutting out all the adverbs won't make your prose better. And substituting exotic verbs for simple verbs, as some anti-adverb crusaders recommend, won't make it better either. In fact, it will make it more pretentious. If you train yourself to be a good prose stylist, if you pay attention to the quality of your prose as you write, you will use adverbs appropriately where they are needed.
Similarly, people who don't pay attention to their prose often end up writing convoluted sentences that are hard to read and then try to fix them with punctuation. If you get down to semicolons in this attempt to punctuate a broken sentence it is a good sign your sentence needs to be rewritten. In fact, I would state it as an axiom that if you have any question about how to punctuate a sentence, you should probably rewrite the sentence, and, quite possibly, the entire paragraph. But really great sentences can sometimes require semicolons and taking out all the semicolons will make the great sentences worse but it won't make the bad sentences better.
Any rule that makes an enemy of any part of speech or any punctuation mark is bollocks. Great prose stylists use them all. To determine if an adverb or a semicolon is appropriate in a particular sentence, you have to look at the overall quality of the prose. Adverbs and semicolons may be relatively rare in good prose, but they have their place and are something essential to felicity of expression.
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A semicolon is a complex beast:
- You don't use it when you want an idea to stand on its own. You use a full stop for that.
- You don't use it to tie two ideas closely together because if you did, you'd relate them with lighter punctuation like a comma.
- You use it to relate two ideas weakly; it strongly implies there's a relationship between the two conjoined ideas but leaves it to the reader to determine what that implied relationship is.
As a result, it's difficult to use semicolons frequently without also using a slightly opaque writing style. When you use a semicolon, the fact that it clearly relates two clauses together without giving a direct indication what the relationship is necessarily forces your reader to read in-between the lines.
If you look at the list I gave above, the second bullet point relates its two clauses explicitly with the word because, allowing you to immediately understand that the second clause is related to the first due to providing an explanation for the first clause. In the third bullet point, the semicolon implies exactly the same relationship, but you are forced to read more carefully in order to understand that. You have to understand the two clauses separately, my implied context for writing this answer, and the parallelism in the entire list before you can be sure you correctly understand how the two halves of the sentence relate. It's not much more work, but it is more work nevertheless.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing because sometimes, that more opaque writing style is what you want. It's important to keep in mind that for writing fiction in particular, though, part of what you need to accomplish is making the task of reading your work pleasant and enjoyable for your readers. You typically want to write using a style that makes the semantic meaning of your story jump off of the page, allowing the reader to spend their mental energy on more sophisticated levels of your writing, such as the subtext in dialog or the thematic implications of characters' decisions. And, if possible, you want your writing to have a musical or poetic quality to it such that it "sounds good" in the reader's head.
Typically, a semicolon works counter to both of those goals. If you force a reader to spend some time figuring out whether your semicolon in, "I wanted to kill her; she had done so much to me," means that the speaker wants to kill her because of or in spite of what she had done, that's more work the reader has to do before getting back to reading in-between the lines of your story proper. And if you're trying to write with a musical quality, then forcing the reader to grind to a halt to understand a semicolon correctly can interrupt the rhythm (unless you're trying to get a slower effect).
All in all, though, these are definitely things to keep in mind at the level of being nitpicky. I would much rather read a story filled with semicolons, even awkward ones, that has compelling characters and themes than read a disjointed story with spotless prose. And every writer has their own style. Some people will never have occasion to use semicolons; others, like myself, will use them on occasion. You seem to like them, so more power to you!
When you finish your first few drafts of your story, you'll reach the point where the most important considerations aren't the structure or strength of the story proper, which have already been vetted and are largely set in stone, but rather getting the nuance and tone of each passage just so. This is the best time to consider the ideas of making your reading easy to approach and musical, and this is when you can really think carefully about each individual use of a semicolon. Until then, it's probably best to enjoy the story yourself as you discover it in the first couple drafts and not worry too much about the fine details of your prose, which you will thoroughly rework anyway.
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I think most people just FEAR the semicolon!
Below is an excerpt from https://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon
How to use a semicolon The most feared punctuation on earth.
skipping over WHY and HOW
WHEN - When should I use a semicolon? "I gnaw on old car tires; it strengthens my jaw so I'll be better conditioned for bear combat." Use a semicolon when you want to form a bond between two statements, typically when they are related to or contrast with one another. In the example above, the relationship between gnawing on tires and combatting bears is strengthened by using a semicolon. "I fought the bear and won. Also, I never kiss plague rats on the mouth." In this sentence, your victory against the bear does not need to be connected to the plague rat, so a period is used.
INTERNAL - Use a semicolon to connect sentences that contain internal punctuation. "When dinosaurs agree on something, they'll often high-five one another; dinosaurs are all about high fives." If you'd used a comma in the sentence, it would have resulted in a comma splice. If you'd used a period, you'd lose the connection between the two clauses.
SUPER - Use a semicolon as a super-comma. "While searching for a good place to get a unicorn burger, I travelled to Seattle, Washington, Tokyo, Japan; and London, England." Use a semicolon if you need to make a list of items that are separated with a comma. This often occurs when listing locations, names, dates, and descriptions.
Again, this brilliance is excerpted from The Oatmeal's Grammar Comics , but the basic concept is one I've agreed with. Semicolons are not fancy ; they're just another tool with a specific set of use cases, some of which are quite common.
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I myself have been criticised on at least one occasion for using too many semicolons in my writing. I hadn't noticed at the time, but I really was overusing them. It's one of the quirks of my writing style that I now try and consciously tone down, along with starting dialogue paragraphs with "the character did this" and my inability to go three pages without someone making some kind of witty or sarcastic remark.
My use of semicolons in fiction writing is generally limited to descriptive paragraphs, where run-on sentences are more acceptable. Often, I end up with two short sentences describing the same object; a semicolon is a neat way of linking them together without resorting to "and". (See?)
The only hard-and-fast rule I have when using semicolons is that I limit myself to one per paragraph. This stops me from overloading my descriptions with them and forces me to vary my sentence structure more to keep things interesting. But in general, I see nothing wrong with using semicolons. The trick, as with most things in writing, is not to overuse them.
EDIT: After a brief discussion in the comments, I'd like to add that it's also important to make sure you're using semicolons correctly. Part of the backlash against them is due to writers using them inappropriately. Semicolons are for linking related clauses, as I did in my example. They're not just fancy commas.
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