“Do not use semicolons. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” – Kurt Vonnegut
(This post is inspired by – and that quote taken from – this article in The Guardian).
I bloody love a semicolon. I think of it as a comma with a built-in snooze button. A gentle pause before adding a related thought.
It creates a dynamic flow to your writing; reiterating a point, and reinforcing it.
“Further research by Lisa McLendon, author of The Perfect English Grammar Workbook, found 67% of British students never or rarely use the semicolon. Just 11% of respondents described themselves as frequent users.”
Maybe I’m just getting old – “no” cried everybody, he said hopefully – but I’ll mourn the loss of the semicolon if it happens.