Posted on 05/21/2025 12:53:11 PM PDT by Red Badger
A recent study has found a 50% decline in the use of semicolons over the last two decades. The decline accelerates a longterm trend: “In 1781, British literature featured a semicolon roughly every 90 words; by 2000, it had fallen to one every 205 words. Today, there’s just one semicolon for every 390 words.”
Further research reported that 67% of British students never or rarely use a semicolon; more than 50% did not know how to use it. Just 11% of respondents described themselves as frequent users.
These findings may not be definitive. According to the Guardian, the Google Books Ngram Viewer database, which surveys novels and nonfiction, indicates that “semicolon use in English rose by 388% between 1800 and 2006, before falling by 45% over the next 11 years. In 2017, however, it started a gradual recovery, with a 27% rise by 2022.”
Yet when you put the punctuation mark itself into the database, rather than the word “semicolon,” you get a quite different result – one that looks very much like a steady decline.
Virulent detractors
The semicolon first appeared in 1494, so it has been around for a long time. So have arguments about it.
Its dectractors can be quite virulent. It is sometimes taken as a sign of affected elitism. Adrian Mole, the pretentious schoolboy protagonist of Sue Townsend’s popular novels, says snobbishly of Barry Kent, the skinhead bully at his school: “He wouldn’t know what a semicolon was if it fell into his beer.” Kurt Vonnegut (whose novels are not entirely free of semicolons) said semicolons represented “absolutely nothing” and using them just showed that you “went to college”.
Other writers have expressed pure animosity. American journalist James Kilpatrick denounced the semicolon “girly,” “odious,” and the “most pusillanimous, sissified utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented.”
The utility of this much maligned punctuation mark in contemporary prose has been called into question. British author Ben McIntyre has claimed Stephen King “wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semicolon.”
He obviously hasn’t read page 32 of King’s wonderful book On Writing, where King uses semicolons in three sentences in a row.
Impeccable balance
Before I defend the semicolon, it is worth clarifying what it actually does. Its two uses are as follows:
1) it separates independent clauses, but establishes a relation between them. It suggests that the statements are too closely connected to stand as separate sentences. For example: “Speech is silver; silence is golden.”
2) it can be used to clarify a complicated list. For example: “Remember to check your grammar, especially agreement of subjects and verbs; your spelling, especially of tricky words such as ‘liaison’; and your punctuation, especially your use of the apostrophe.”
Semicolons have long played a prominent role in classic literature. Journalist Amelia Hill notes that Virginia Woolf relies heavily on semicolons in her meditation on time, Mrs. Dalloway. The novel includes more than 1000 of them, often used in unorthodox ways, to capture the flow of its protagonist’s thoughts.
Other supporters of the semicolon include Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Donna Tartt, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Novelist Philip Hensher has celebrated the semicolon as “a cherished tool, elegant and rational.” In 1953, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan called it “the prize-winning supporting crutch of English prose”.
In his essay Semicolons: A Love Story, Ben Dolnick refers to William James’s deft use of semicolons to pile on the clauses. He claims this is like saying to a reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, “Here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another?”
“The image of the grocery bags,” observed Mary Norris, a highly respected copyeditor at the New Yorker, “reinforces the idea that semicolons are all about balance.” Harvard professor Louis Menand has praised as “impeccable” the balancing semicolon on a public service placard (allegedly amended by hand) that exhorted subway riders not to leave their newspapers behind on the train: “Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.”
The poet Lewis Thomas beautifully captures the elegance of a well-used semicolon in his essay Notes on Punctuation:
The semicolon tells you there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a full stop. The full stop tells you that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.
As Australian novelist David Malouf has argued, the semicolon still has a future, and an important function, in nuanced imaginative prose:
I tend to write longer sentences and use the semicolon so as not to have to break the longer sentences into shorter ones that would suggest things are not connected that I want people to see as connected. Short sentences make for fast reading; often you want slow reading.
We cannot do without the semicolon. The Apostrophe Protection Society is going along very strongly. I would be more than happy to join a Semicolon Supporting Society.
Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor in Writing, The University of Queensland. She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Python’s use of indentation only for block freaks me out. I need terminators for blocks.
Plus, it’s slow.
My bad; I forget sometimes.
It has a useful function but the symbol itself looks clunky on the page. Trump should do an executive order to have the semicolon replaced by the short dash.
I use them a lot! Just not online.
Yow! I just had a simple hemicolectomy, no ostomy or other lasting effects. The surgeon even fixed an umbilical hernia while he was at it.
Stephen King “wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semicolon.”
I wouldn’t know, since I wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a Stephen King product.
Proper use of the semicolon can save a few characters in word counts, when used to replace “but” or “and”, which can also be used to connect two (or more) related phrases before closing the sentence in a period.
However, good writing techniques often suggest against long sentences and give bad marks against both long sentences and very long paragraphs. The trick is not just that the parts divided by the semicolon should be not merely related, but should together help complete an idea or a thought.
I like the semicolon.
I sorta like semicolons, but I am a writer and I never use them in the novel I’m writing.
Why?
Languages and punctuation evolve.
They always have.
Funny how an article espousing the use of semicolons fails to use one here.
The semicolon first appeared in 1494, so it has been around for a long time; so have arguments about it.
In my writing I do my best to keep the semicolon employed. I find it quite useful. |
I find it quite useful to avoid choppy sentences like yours. I would write it this way...
In my writing, I do my best to keep the semicolon employed as I find it quite useful.
Texting and email use has been the main reason that punctuation is disappearing.
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To say nothing of spelling, capitalization, grammar, language without stupid pictures, etc.
The words “however” and “therefore” are always preceded by a semi-colon and followed by a comma.
______________________________________
AI tells me that 40-50 Bible verses begin with the word “therefore”.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-bible-verses-begin-wi-wBC164B1QQSP5biMNBaQCg
However, the writer did not write in verses. The men who composed the Bible broke the writings up into chapters and verses.
I leave short choppy sentences to journalists who write like Kamala speaks.
More picturesque language, good for making a tongue in cheek comment while posting ;;
:)
\;^)
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Let us not overlook:
(_8^()
Won't be much longer until "like" and "bombshell" are all that is left of it.
Neither will compile for a PIC.
A professor in my dad’s seminary told his class that the Bible was divided into verses by a nearly blind monk while riding in a wagon on a rough road.
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