Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

Semicolons
56 assorted things to do (and not to do) with punctuation
The stuff in the front

29.

I love semicolons like I love pizza; fried pork dumplings; Venice, Italy; and the music of Ariana Grande.

Why does the sentence above include semicolons?

Because the most basic use of semicolons is to divide the items in a list any of whose individual elements mandate a comma—in this case, Venice, Italy.

Now, I might certainly have avoided semicolons by reordering the elements in the list:

I love semicolons like I love pizza, fried pork dumplings, the music of Ariana Grande, and Venice, Italy.

But semicolons are unavoidable when you must write something like:

Lucy’s favorite novels are Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.;^*14 Goodbye, Mr. Terupt; and Hey, Kiddo.

Because:

Lucy’s favorite novels are Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., Goodbye, Mr. Terupt, and Hey, Kiddo.

Well, how many novels is that, anyway? Three? Five?

But if that were the only use we had for semicolons, they wouldn’t make so many people—lots of them writers who should know better—cringe. For some reason, those people think semicolons are show-offy.

I’ll let author Lewis Thomas explain why those people are wrong:

The things I like best in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

You may not have read or even heard of T. S. Eliot (and almost certainly have not heard of Lewis Thomas), but doesn’t this passage give you a sense of how evocative semicolons can be? Why limit your powers of expression by denying yourself such a precise tool? Use all the tools.

I’ve been known to insist that the only thing one needs to say in defense of semicolons is that the writer Shirley Jackson liked them. In support of that, I’ve also been known to whip out this, the opening paragraph of Jackson’s masterwork The Haunting of Hill House:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

One paragraph, three semicolons. Shirley Jackson might have chosen to replace those semicolons with periods and start each following clause anew, as an independent sentence. The result, though, would have been the untying, the disconnection, of these tightly woven, almost claustrophobic ideas, and instead of a paragraph that grabs you by the hand and marches you from beginning to end, you would have a collection of plain old sentences.

While we’re here, I’d also like to celebrate that paragraph’s final comma, perhaps my favorite piece of punctuation in all of literature. You might argue that it’s unnecessary—even grammatically uncalled-for—but there it is, the last breath of the paragraph, the author’s way of saying, “This is your last chance to set this book down and go do something else. Because from this point on it’s just you, and me, and whatever it is that walks, and walks alone, in Hill House.”

I dare you to walk away.