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Simon Heffer
19 May 2025 11:41am BST
Reading good prose should be like listening to a well-constructed piece of music: it should have rhythm; it should have cadences; in short, it should have style. In that sentence I have used the four principal marks of punctuation: the colon, the semi-colon, the comma and the full stop. Yet, it is reported, the semi-colon is dying out.
The reason why is simple. The teaching of English in our schools in recent decades has been dismal. There is little attempt to teach grammar seriously, and therefore punctuation becomes disregarded. Used properly, punctuation serves two purposes. It helps avoid ambiguity (as in the famous example of “eats shoots and leaves”), but it also, as I have stated above, makes prose a pleasure to read.
My first sentence illustrates the classic usage of the semicolon: that of breaking up a list following a colon. Colons that precede a series of separate clauses do not inevitably require those clauses to be separated by semi-colons, however. I used semi-colons in the first sentence to give emphasis to the points I was making. In my second sentence I also use a colon, but the subsequent clauses are not separated by semi-colons, but rather by commas. This was because the list contained short clauses, and stylistically to have punctuated them with semi-colons would have created a staccato effect; and if you take the view, as great writers from Shakespeare and Milton onwards usually have, that the musicality of the language is one of its great attributes and perhaps its greatest aid to communication, then the semi-colon becomes highly useful.
I used the mark again in that last sentence, because I felt that the argument contained in the two clauses was too intertwined for them to be separated by something as brutal as a full stop. Short sentences are commendable; but to write in them entirely again creates that machine-gun effect of delivering prose that is not always desirable.
The structure may work in advertising copy, or in news bulletins, but if a writer seeks to compose something that people actually enjoy reading, variety is the key. Sadly, some people today confuse the colon and semi-colon, using the rather aggressive former mark when they should be resorting to the more serene latter one.
Another advantage of the semi-colon is that it makes the reader pause slightly more than a comma would, sometimes to dramatic effect. Virginia Woolf’s use of the mark has been widely noted, and seldom did she deploy it more usefully than in the opening pages of Mrs Dalloway, when her heroine is walking briskly around a busy Westminster on a summer’s morning shopping for a party she is throwing that evening. As a consequence, she is in a heightened emotional state. Mrs Woolf describes the scene superbly: “In people’s eyes; in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands, barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of an aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
It is hard to envisage this vividly descriptive passage being punctuated in any other way than using the semi-colon as the base of its structure. Mrs Dalloway herself is somewhat unhinged, and the sheer intensity of what she sees and feels is perfectly conveyed by her punctuation, as is the build-up to the climax of her perception.
Not every writer is, or should be, a Virginia Woolf: but the semi-colon remains an essential tool for the serious writer, professional or amateur. It conveys in different ways nuance, tension and clarity: but above all it conveys a sense of style; and in this drab world, an assured style of writing that gives the reader pleasure is precious indeed.
www.telegraph.co.uk
19 May 2025 11:41am BST
Reading good prose should be like listening to a well-constructed piece of music: it should have rhythm; it should have cadences; in short, it should have style. In that sentence I have used the four principal marks of punctuation: the colon, the semi-colon, the comma and the full stop. Yet, it is reported, the semi-colon is dying out.
The reason why is simple. The teaching of English in our schools in recent decades has been dismal. There is little attempt to teach grammar seriously, and therefore punctuation becomes disregarded. Used properly, punctuation serves two purposes. It helps avoid ambiguity (as in the famous example of “eats shoots and leaves”), but it also, as I have stated above, makes prose a pleasure to read.
My first sentence illustrates the classic usage of the semicolon: that of breaking up a list following a colon. Colons that precede a series of separate clauses do not inevitably require those clauses to be separated by semi-colons, however. I used semi-colons in the first sentence to give emphasis to the points I was making. In my second sentence I also use a colon, but the subsequent clauses are not separated by semi-colons, but rather by commas. This was because the list contained short clauses, and stylistically to have punctuated them with semi-colons would have created a staccato effect; and if you take the view, as great writers from Shakespeare and Milton onwards usually have, that the musicality of the language is one of its great attributes and perhaps its greatest aid to communication, then the semi-colon becomes highly useful.
I used the mark again in that last sentence, because I felt that the argument contained in the two clauses was too intertwined for them to be separated by something as brutal as a full stop. Short sentences are commendable; but to write in them entirely again creates that machine-gun effect of delivering prose that is not always desirable.
The structure may work in advertising copy, or in news bulletins, but if a writer seeks to compose something that people actually enjoy reading, variety is the key. Sadly, some people today confuse the colon and semi-colon, using the rather aggressive former mark when they should be resorting to the more serene latter one.
Another advantage of the semi-colon is that it makes the reader pause slightly more than a comma would, sometimes to dramatic effect. Virginia Woolf’s use of the mark has been widely noted, and seldom did she deploy it more usefully than in the opening pages of Mrs Dalloway, when her heroine is walking briskly around a busy Westminster on a summer’s morning shopping for a party she is throwing that evening. As a consequence, she is in a heightened emotional state. Mrs Woolf describes the scene superbly: “In people’s eyes; in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands, barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of an aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
It is hard to envisage this vividly descriptive passage being punctuated in any other way than using the semi-colon as the base of its structure. Mrs Dalloway herself is somewhat unhinged, and the sheer intensity of what she sees and feels is perfectly conveyed by her punctuation, as is the build-up to the climax of her perception.
Not every writer is, or should be, a Virginia Woolf: but the semi-colon remains an essential tool for the serious writer, professional or amateur. It conveys in different ways nuance, tension and clarity: but above all it conveys a sense of style; and in this drab world, an assured style of writing that gives the reader pleasure is precious indeed.
The semi-colon is an essential tool for any serious writer
Use of the semi-colon has apparently halved in the last 20 years. Yet it is key to great prose style and we should lament its decline
www.telegraph.co.uk
