Newsflash in this week: The semicolon is experiencing something of a lull, writes Lucy Stephens.
New research from Lisa McLendon and The Perfect English Grammar Workbook finds that this most elegant and refined of punctuation marks is seeing a decline in use.
To drill down further, the study showed that use of the semicolon appears just once in every 390 words in today’s English books, compared with one in every 205 at the turn of the millennium.
Should we be concerned?
Publicity
Judging by the amount of publicity McLendon’s study has received this week, members of the Great British Press are definitely worried about the decline of the semicolon. At any rate, they feel it’s a topic worth reporting on.
Practically every newspaper has weighed in on the issue. The Guardian even published a helpful quiz allowing readers to test their knowledge on its correct use.
I was a latecomer to the semicolon myself.
I remember asking a teacher about it at school. “How do I use the semicolon anyway? I never really know.”
He said: “You just use it in place of a full stop if you’ve got two connected sentences that each work grammatically on their own.”
This was the teacher, by the way, who also told me how to remember the difference between ‘practice’ – noun – and ‘practise’ – verb. He advised me to compare them with the word ‘advice’, which follows the same grammatical rule.
Useful or what? Thank you very much, Mr Lang.
So, from that point on I did know about the semicolon. And of course, let’s not forget its useful demarcation role in certain types of lists.
But I can’t say, kind of fond of it though I am, I’ve used it much in my writing since then. Whisper it, but I find the semicolon rather a ponderous piece of punctuation, if I’m honest.
Quality
So is the semicolon worth sticking up for? In all seriousness, what’s the problem here? Is there even a problem?
As lovers of all things English, an appreciation of style, grammar and clever wordplay is very important to us Penguins.
You might even say it’s our stock in trade.
To use the semicolon correctly is a mark of quality in a sentence. It quietly says – not screams (that would be rather over the top) – ‘I can construct a sentence well; I really know what I’m doing.’
Note the use of the dash in the sentence above, by the way.
Now the dash is perhaps the antithesis of the semicolon. As punctuation marks go (and yes, I have in my mind made them into personality types), the dash is a brash sort of character.
A dash has swagger. It says, ‘This sentence is in a hurry – it needs to jam in a lot of ideas in a short space of time and not lose your interest’. If a semicolon is more the reserved type, a dash is the punctuation mark your parents might disapprove of. I feel it probably wears a studded leather jacket and barges into your home without stopping to wipe its shoes on the doormat.
The dash is very useful in journalism and storytelling.
It keeps things moving. It’s brisk. It often helps connect loosely connected ideas.
I think it’s fair to say that the semicolon – much though we love it – doesn’t appear that much in journalistic writing.
To semicolon or not?
I guess that brings me to what I want to say about the semicolon, dubbed by Abraham Lincoln (who perhaps also, like, me thought of punctuation marks as characters), “a useful little chap”.
Everything has its place.
I don’t use semicolons that much because I’m a storyteller aiming to get my work into newspapers, websites and other platforms.
In my mind, despite its use as a pause in a sentence rather than – I guess, a longer pause afforded by a full stop – the semicolon does slow things down.
When I write something for digital use, I really want readers to get to the end of the stories I tell.
To do that, I need to keep my writing pacy and (hopefully) interesting. As trained journalists we have skills in this area. We know that people connect with people and so the best way of getting our messages out there is to put quotes (direct speech) directly from a person high up in our stories to keep up our readers’ interest.
Writing for platforms like LinkedIn, it’s harder still to keep people reading when they can so easily scroll through our posts.
For social media, a new kind of writing has evolved: one involving sentences of very few words, lots of spacing, plenty of ‘hooks’, and good use of imaginative bullet points so as to stop a reader mid-scroll and capture their attention for a few seconds.
The semicolon, I’m afraid, has no place at all in that kind of writing. Allow a social media sentence to ‘pause’, and you can forget someone getting to the end. If I feel a semicolon coming on when writing for social media, I have a stern word with myself, break up the sentence, and shove in a full stop. And a paragraph break.
Longer reads
But none of that means that the semicolon deserves to be forgotten. Despite my feelings of antipathy towards it as a punctuation mark, I do feel it would be a shame if it was to disappear altogether.
Just because I’m not (yet) a writer of novels – give me time – I still love to read them. I enjoy poetry. I like sitting down and reading a long feature in a Sunday magazine. I can appreciate a loving description of a meal in one of the recipe books that are popular these days and as much about lifestyle as cooking.
In all of those contexts, the semicolon definitely has its place. I’d even say it should be thriving.
Living language
Yet, when all’s said and done, we can worry as much as we like about the English language and its peculiarities and quirks. We can strive to protect its intricacies, its twists and turns. We can lecture people about apostrophes and how to write properly.
As Penguins, we definitely can – and should – stick up for good written English that connects with people’s hearts and minds.
But language is a living thing. It evolves. And people will read what they want and how they want.
What that means for the semicolon is, if we want to use it, it will live on. If we no longer have a use for it, it won’t.
Like many subtle aspects of our language, with the onslaught of attention-grabbing communication in the world these days, I suspect the semicolon may well slowly decline.
If we want to appreciate it, now’s the time.
Or, to put it another way: The time is now to appreciate the humble semi-colon; its time may be brief.
