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Good Semicolons Make Good Neighbors

By Roy Peter Clark

My wife Karen worked with cancer patients for many years and taught me that an essential part of recovery is a good sense of humor. So when our great pastor, Father Robert Gibbons, announced to the congregation that he'd need surgery for colon cancer, I rushed up to him after Mass with this happy thought: "Father, by the time they're finished with you, you may be the only man in American who knows how to use a semicolon."

The joke had the desired effect on the brainy cleric: It made him laugh.  

Come to think of it, the semicolon does look a little like a colon with a polyp. In truth, it is probably used more often these days in winking emoticons ;-) than as an alternative to the period or the comma. Maybe because it looks like a period sitting atop a comma, it sends off an aura of "neither here nor there," threatening me with its indifference.

I assure you that I'm not a punctuation iconoclast; I know the correct uses of the semicolon. I just don't like the way it looks on the page, like an ink smudge on a new white carpet.

Whenever I'm having unsettled thoughts about punctuation, I turn to Tom Wolfe. It was in the 1960s, after all, when Wolfe and his buddies began to bust the boundaries of conventional journalism.  Among those innovations was a tendency to use punctuation like hot spice on a Cajun stew. A little this! ... A little that!*! ... Bada boom!!!

So, on a whim, I pulled out a copy of Wolfe's 1998 novel, "A Man in Full," and thumbed through it until my eye caught this passage on page 262:

I love this paragraph for many reasons, but especially for the ambitious varieties of punctuation, including 10 periods, eight commas, five semicolons, and three dashes. I am especially intrigued by the unusual use of the semicolon in that central sentence:

"Nothing; dead; it was out of order; he couldn't get the quarter back; he jiggled the lever; he pounded the machine with the heel of his hand."

I must admit that I would have been tempted to replace each semicolon with a period. In its current form, the sentence seems unparallel and out of joint. But, then, isn't that the point of the sentence?  In a panic, a man -- in the days before the cell phone -- needs coins and a working pay phone to make an important human connection. By means of those semicolons, Wolfe describes a frantic series of actions that proceed in chronological order and together form a single sentence, a complete thought.

Abandoning Wolfe, I went from author to author looking for semicolons and was surprised to see the radically different preferences of writers, scholars, and critics. A collection of essays by 20th century philosopher Hannah Arendt produced very few among hundreds of pages, while cultural critic Greil Marcus relies upon them again and again, especially when he is trying to divide/connect two short important points: "Innocence is the colorless stain on the national tapestry," he writes in "The Shape of Things to Come." "It violates the landscape; the only way to kill it is to cut it out."

Or "Alone, Madison plays a third video that has turned up. Like the first two, it opens in black and white; then in color it shows him kneeling on his bedroom floor."

Or "In his cell Madison has a vision of a house on stilts set in sand, burning; then the smoke and fire are sucked back into the house with a snap."

What strikes me about these uses of the semicolon is their arbitrariness, as if the semicolon were a mark of choice rather than rule. Let me demonstrate the array of choices inspired by this Marcus sentence: "The Swede is the good son; Jerry is the bad son."

But why not: "The Swede is the good son. Jerry is the bad son."
Or: "The Swede is the good son, but Jerry is the bad son."
Or: "The Swede is the good son, Jerry the bad son."
Or with some subordination: "While the Swede is the good son, Jerry is the bad son."

So if none of those choices is grammatically incorrect, then what impulse governs the writer? It sounds to me as if the writer is left with a musical decision. To the ear of Marcus, the semicolon without conjunction creates a balance achieved by simultaneous connection and separation.

What kind of object connects and separates at the same time? I suppose there are a number of correct answers, including the Wonder Bra; but I'm thinking more of the swinging gate. That's how I see the semicolon in my own writing, as a gate that stands between two thoughts, a barrier that forces separation but invites you to pass through to the other side.

So when would I use the semicolon in my own writing? My choices are governed more by sight than sound, especially on those occasions when the flow of the sentence threatens to overflow the banks established by weaker forms of punctuation. Consider this autobiographical sentence:

If I used only commas in that rambling and energetic sentence, there would be 10 of them, too many to help the reader keep track of its parts. When I substitute semi-colons, the parts became clear.  You can see them with your eye: A topic clause, followed by one part Duke, one part Willie, one part the Mick.

So there remains a place for the semicolon even at a time, according to English professor Jennifer DeVere Brody, when the misunderstood mark "suffers nightmares from its precarious position" between the period and the comma. Perhaps it will be saved by the likes of author Maurya Simon, who has her own peculiar dreams about punctuation:

The semicolon is
Like a sperm forever frozen in its yearning towards an ovum,
like a tadpole swimming upstream to rouse the moons dropped coin,

like an ooze of oil spilt from an inky bubble, the
   semicolon
signifies both motion and stillness, an undulant pause, a
    moments
         stalled momentum.

Exactly, Ms. Simon, like an inkblot on a white carpet; and I notice that you did not use a single semicolon in this passage!

Full post as published by Writing Tools on July 09, 2008 (boomark / email).