The Chuuni Corner

Tuned fast; radioed out

The semicolon gets a bad rap.

Most day-to-day people never use them in today’s world of simplified, text-driven messages. They also look a little funky. (I mean, let’s be honest, a period on top of a comma? Get out of here.) Even Kurt Vonnegut, the beloved and creative author of stories such as Cat’s Cradle, is quoted as saying (with hyperbole and slightly out of context), “All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

He later goes on to say about his rule of never using them that “Rules only take us so far, even good ones.” With this thought in mind, I’ll provide the rule that I was taught which made me into a semicolon expert: Semicolons connect equal grammatical units. To go even simpler, think of the semicolon as an equals sign. That’s it. So long as one remembers this rule, the semicolon should be yet another tool in thy writer’s arsenal.

I like semicolons; they’re very fun to use. I don’t like Occultic;Nine; its semicolon doesn’t do it for me.

Read the rest of this entry »