Time to Abolish Semicolons?

By Dorian Box

It happened suddenly.

Too many years of deleting semicolons that editors had substituted for periods in my writing made me snap.

I was reading page edits of a recent article–converting the one-hundredth brand new semicolon back to a period–when it struck me like lightning.

It’s time to set aside our differences, to unite as a global society, rise up and shout, “Enough already with the freaking semicolons!”

And I’m not just suggesting they be used sparingly. I say go all the way. Abolish them.

I’m not a punctuation bigot. I hold no grudge  against umlauts or even asterisms.  I admit to having a few hard feelings toward commas, but enjoy emdashes, exclamation points, and spending long weekends with parentheses.

But my true love is periods. My mother was a newspaper reporter and journalism professor from the old school.  Between chewing on pencils and guzzling bitter coffee, she taught me to keep sentences short and terse.  It was good advice then; it’s even better today in our attention-challenged world.

Did you notice that? I used a semicolon above where some writers would insert one. But why? The only purpose of a semicolon is to connect two separate thoughts that could be  separate sentences.

Says one book on punctuation: “The primary function of the semicolon is to connect two complete (thematically similar) sentences, thereby making them one.” Noah Lukeman, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. Nevertheless, the author defends semicolons as “probably the most elegant of all forms of punctuation.”

In 2006, James J. Kilpatrick attacked the above defense of semicolons  with a vengeance:

What hokum! What bosh, what baloney, what bilge! The semicolon is a belly-up guppie in a tank of glorious Siamese fighting fish. It’s girly. It is not just probably the most useless of all forms of punctuation. It is absolutely, positively the most useless of all such marks ever invented. Its sole legitimate function is to separate individual elements in a listing of linked elements.

Wow, and I thought I disliked our little comma-weighed-down-by-a-period friend.  Kilpatrick, the fiery conservative journalist who died in 2010 at 89, was never one to hide his feelings.  His aggressive debates with Shana Alexander on 60 Minutes led to a hilarious trash-talking parody by Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin in the early days of Saturday Night Live.

What do you think?  A lot of great writers, both icons from the past and current favorites, regularly used or use semicolons.  A legitimate argument I see for occasional semicolons is they don’t break up separate, but connected, thoughts as abruptly as periods do.  Accurate, but question-begging to a degree because it comes back to the same issue.  If they’re separate thoughts, why connect them in the first place?

If you’re a novice writer, refrain from sentences longer than fifty words, a guideline hammered into me back in journalism school.  If you’re struggling with a sentence, it might be because you’re trying to cram too many words (and thoughts) into it.  Just break it in two, or even three.  Some sentences and thoughts call for more words, but a fifty word-max is a good rule of thumb–and helps avoid the need for semicolons.

Darn.  Doing a “find” search of Psycho-Tropics, I discovered two semicolons had somehow infiltrated the book’s 462 pages.  The sneaky devils were cleverly hidden in a piece of song verse.

Hmm.  Maybe we should keep them around after all.

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