The semi-colon: underused and over-abused.

Has it ever struck you how inadequate punctuation can be? Do you find yourself over-using ellipses? Have you ever yearned to use both an exclamation mark and a question mark at the same time? Sometimes, when I write, I just get so frustrated by how punctuation-poor our language is. Commas seem brief. Periods seem so final. I try to use dashes and ellipses to eke out a little more nuance from written language, but it's always a compromise. So it stuns me that so many writers eschew the lovely semi-colon. Many editors despise them. There have been whole publishing houses that refuse to print one. The demise of the semi-colon can be traced to the rise of journalistic writing in the early decades of the 20th Century. The reason for its death was simple: most journalists just didn't know how to use them. It's just that stupid. They died because of ignorance. There are two uses for a semi-colon. The simplest use is easy to learn and makes a lot of sense. Use a semi-colon after a colon when creating a list of clauses that contain commas: There are many shades of black: ebony has a dusty, dry colour; midnight [...]