Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life

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Cecelia Watson. Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Introduction. Love, Hate and Semicolons

I. Deep History. The Birth of the Semicolon

II. The Science of Semicolons. English Grammar Wars

III. Sexy Semicolons

IV. Loose Women and Liquor Laws. The Semicolon Wreaks Havoc in Boston

V. The Minutiae of Mercy

VI. Carving Semicolons in Stone

VII. Semicolon Savants

THE BIG PAUSE

HEROIN ADDICTS EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME

BLUBBER AND BLATHER

TRUST ME, I’M A WRITER

THE LINE AND THE DASH: WHY USE THE SEMICOLON NOW?

VIII. Persuasion and Pretension. Are Semicolons for Snobs?

Conclusion. Against the Rules?

Acknowledgements

Notes. INTRODUCTION: LOVE, HATE AND SEMICOLONS

I: DEEP HISTORY

II: THE SCIENCE OF SEMICOLONS

III: SEXY SEMICOLONS

IV: LOOSE WOMEN AND LIQUOR LAWS

V: THE MINUTIAE OF MERCY

VI: CARVING SEMICOLONS IN STONE

VII: SEMICOLON SAVANTS

VIII: PERSUASION AND PRETENSION

CONCLUSION: AGAINST THE RULES?

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

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who made sure I always had enough to read

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Morris offered a way to get beyond the deference to Latin and Greek that he believed had made earlier grammarians so error-prone: he advocated observing English carefully, and then making rules based on those observations, rather than trying to squeeze English grammar into frameworks designed for dead languages.‡‡ Grammar rules would then arise directly from scrutinising English in action – and conveniently enough, the study of grammar would thus acquire for itself some of the virtues of the natural sciences that were being championed in the press, where commentators regularly argued that students were inherently inclined towards the observation and study of natural phenomena.

Grammarians had a second strategy to advance against critics who complained about the inferiority of grammar when compared to the natural sciences: the sentence diagram. Any good science textbook had diagrams, and if grammar was to be a science, it surely needed a system of schematic illustrations as well. And so in 1847, a grammarian named Stephen Clark introduced a system of diagrams designed to relate to the ‘Science of Language’ as maps did to geography, and figures to geometry and arithmetic. (It might sound odd to the modern reader to think of geography and geometry as natural sciences like physics and chemistry, but plenty of people back in Clark’s days thought of them that way, and even people who didn’t categorise those areas of study as ‘sciences’ believed the two disciplines were essential for the study of both the natural sciences and other respected fields like philosophy. And, unlike grammar, the mathematical sciences were considered ‘perfect’ and ‘useful’.)

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