15 July 2026

Apparently some people hate (or love) semicolons

TYWKIWDBI loves semicolons, so I was surprised and intrigued by the content of an article at Literary Hub
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. . . All they do is show you’ve been to college. "(Kurt Vonnegut)

"I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I’ll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript" (Edward Abbey) [In reference to The Monkey Wrench Gang and preserved in Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast]

"With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semi-colon; it’s a useful little chap." (Abraham Lincoln)

"I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”" (Ursula LeGuin) [from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination]

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