Featured Post

BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Thursday, March 3, 2011

A Paper Without Semi-Colons

I have never found a very good reason to use a semi-colon. I did a search for them in the paper I am writing now and eliminated all but those necessary for format reasons. There was only one. Since the two parts of the sentence separated by this obnoxious piece of punctuation are grammatically complete units, I separate them with a period. If they are so related that they are begging to be in the same sentence, I recast them to subordinate one to the other.

Gertrude Stein only used commas and periods. No questions marks, no exclamations points, no colons or semis. I need colons to introduce quotes. i would gladly get rid of those within my own sentences. Imagine a paper with no large intestines.

It might seem a bit arbitrary, but I feel that semi-colons make the page look too cluttered. it's an aesthetic decision. I feel that I can get away with it because I am not contravening any international treaties or grammatical rules.

6 comments:

Andrew Shields said...

Why don't you use coordination to replace semicolons sometimes?

Jonathan said...

I'm sure I do that too, but I'm not consciously replacing a semi-colon.

Bronwen said...

I love how Stein says that questions marks can be kind of cute as a cattle brand or something, but not something you actually want to use in writing. :)

brownstudy said...

What about dashes, either to separate material (to avoid using commas) (and in that case, why?) or to perhaps signal some point to the reader?

Jonathan said...

Call me a hypocrite, but I love dashes.

Andrew Shields said...

Dashes and semicolons are not usually interchangeable, so you're not a hypocrite. — On this score at least ... :-)