A Word, Please: Where have all the semicolons gone?

Semicolon use is down, and its slide is making headlines. In the U.S., these punctuation marks are appearing in published books about half as often as they did 25 years ago. The same trend can be seen in the U.K., where only 11% of students surveyed reported that they regularly use semicolons.

Some people say this decline is a tragedy. But before you take their word for it, consider who’s not saying this: readers.

You can listen to a thousand laments about the death of the semicolon and never hear a single complaint from the reader’s point of view. No one says they would have enjoyed a piece of writing more if it contained more semicolons. No one says they struggled to understand short sentences because they weren’t mashed together into longer, more complicated sentences. No one searches an e-book sample to make sure it has enough semicolons before they buy it.

Semicolon love is purely a supply-side phenomenon. Here’s one example of an impassioned pro-semicolon argument: “I’d be reading an article about a flood in Mexico, which would lead me to thinking about a wedding I once went to in Cancun, which would lead me to thinking about marriage, which would lead to gay marriage, which would lead to the presidential election, which would lead to swing states, which would lead to a fascinatingly terrible country song called ‘Swing’ — and I’d be three songs into a Trace Adkins YouTube marathon before I’d glance back down at the newspaper on the table. It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful.”

Honoring the movement of mind. Whose mind? Not the reader’s.

I don’t know about you, but when I read a story, an article or an essay, I’m not in it to honor the author. The very idea runs counter to the writer’s job, which is to transform information and ideas into something valuable to the reader. To honor the reader’s needs over one’s own.

Most of the semicolons I see in my editing work amount to simple showing off. The writers, it seems, are so proud they know how to use semicolons they forget it’s not about them. One writer I’ve been editing for years puts exactly one semicolon in almost every feature article she writes. What are the odds that somewhere between 50 and 100 articles she’s submitted all needed exactly one semicolon? Far lower than the odds that she just wanted to use one.

Semicolons between independent clauses are unnecessary about 99% of the time. Yes, they show that the clauses are closely related. But would that be any less clear if each clause was its own sentence?

Semicolons are silliest in paragraphs containing just two clauses. Those clauses’ relationship to each other is already crystal clear. What is gained by making those two sentences into one?

Besides connecting independent clauses, semicolons have another job: organizing lists too unwieldy for commas to manage. Usually, this means lists of things that contain their own commas: “They traveled to Dubuque, Iowa; Butte, Montana; and Santa Fe, New Mexico.”

In these cases, semicolons are more than justified. They’re essential. But they’re also dangerous. They make it easy to cram too many bits of information into a single sentence instead of doling out the facts in more easily digestible short sentences. “They traveled to Dubuque, Iowa, where they visited a museum; Butte, Montana, which is stunningly beautiful; and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they had fun shopping for one-of-a-kind works by local artisans.” The semicolon lets you do that, but that doesn’t mean it’s your friend.

Anytime you’re tempted to lean on semicolons to make sense of your sentence, try breaking it up into shorter sentences instead. It’s the right thing to do for your reader.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.