Mother in Law: In defence of the semicolon

In 2019 I wrote an article about commas. I think excellent writing skills account for about 75% of the job and are increasingly undervalued. It is very hard to be an excellent lawyer without excellent written communication skills. The article received the following anonymous comment:

Why is this still a thing? It’s like one of those nightmares where you wind up at a dinner party listening to unfunny dialogue that has everyone laughing and clapping manically while you think… should I get up or sit in sheer terror to the beige boredom of self indulgent twaddle [no full stop]

Unusually for me, disgust at the stinking grammar was not my first reaction. It was actually a little bit of heartbreak. Luckily, some people like reading my articles and I’ve continued to write them once a fortnight and had other comments like:

I simply love reading your blogs and Spot on and just reading this makes me feel better. I love your column and look forward to reading it. Thanks!

You may think this article is going to be about resilience. Oh no. Because the one about commas was so popular, I’m levelling up. This article is about the semicolon.

I didn’t start using the semicolon until I was about 35; if you are younger than that you might be too young. Don’t fret; you will reach these dizzy grammar heights soon enough. It will be something to look forward to; it will be something positive to compensate for the receding hairline and creaky knees.

I will stop doing that now.

Some people really don’t like semicolons. My husband says he has never used one and reckons it was invented by accident by someone accidentally flicking ink from a quill when trying to write a comma. I bet he used one before he got a smartphone to text a winking emoji but that is about it. Stephen King doesn’t like them either.

But what about the actual greatest communicators in living memory? Of course I am talking (not for the first time) about the holy trinity of Swift, Springsteen and Steinbeck (pictured). I have wasted an hour or two of my life trying to prove, for the purposes of this article, that both Swift and Springsteen are probably both big semicolon users – time I could have spent ironing school uniforms or something. Turns out you don’t get a lot of semicolons in song lyrics. Like a number of wills and contracts I have read, you don’t get much punctuation at all. They are there, though, in the lilting tones and intonation. They would be there if the words were prose.

The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways; like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays. Or Got a long list of ex-lovers; they’ll tell you I’m insane. Or I have this dream my daughter-in-law kills me for the money; she thinks I left them in the will.

Steinbeck likes a well-placed semicolon. Unusually, he is fond of placing one before the word ‘and’. This is unusual because the correct use of a semicolon is between two phrases that could be separate sentences but hold closely related ideas. For example I wonder why she’s quoting Taylor Swift; this is a legal news publication after all. Or I really wish I could buy a cream-coloured sofa; I should never have had children. Or I was having a bad day; to cheer me up I googled THAT photo of Bruce Springsteen.

They should not usually be followed by a conjunction. For example We’ve got to get out while we’re young, because tramps like us, baby, we were born to run. (A comma is correct here before the word ‘because’.) Or My daughter hasn’t bathed since Monday, but she smells all right. (A comma is correct here because of the word ‘but’.)

The reasons Steinbeck can use a semicolon before an ‘and’ are:

• He also starts sentences with the word ‘And’; and
• He is John Steinbeck and his words flow like maple syrup so we just let him do what he wants.

This brings me to the other use for a semicolon – separating items in a list. Particularly a list where the individual items are long and may include commas themselves. A better example is as follows:

Things to do:

• Tidy the house before the cleaner comes including unloading the dishwasher, reloading the dishwasher, and making sure all the dirty washing in the house is in a basket;
• Get kids’ stuff for school by the door including guitars, lunch boxes and kit for after-school clubs;
• Feed the Enormous Puppy; and
• Post birthday card.

In the course of researching this article, I found out that the semicolon (often as a tattoo) is now symbolic of someone getting through suicidal times, because it isn’t an ending. So that is rather lovely too.

In conclusion, I reiterate that, even though it is 2024, we should have pride in our written communication. More than that, I think it can be the difference between a mediocre lawyer and a great one, and the difference between resolving a dispute or getting a deal done, and not. When I dictate the word ‘semicolon’ I know I am on fire and if you (and by you I mean my husband) think that makes me pompous then, as I learned in 2019, haters are gonna hate; I will just shake it off.

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article