: The Good, the Bad, and the Semicolon I completed my novel and an editor friend graciously offered to assist me with formatting. As a former scientist, I am more familiar with technical or academic

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I think most people just FEAR the semicolon!

Below is an excerpt from theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon

How to use a semicolon
The most feared punctuation on earth.

skipping over WHY and HOW

WHEN - When should I use a semicolon?
"I gnaw on old car tires; it strengthens my jaw so I'll be better conditioned for bear combat."
Use a semicolon when you want to form a bond between two statements, typically when they are related to or contrast with one another. In the example above, the relationship between gnawing on tires and combatting bears is strengthened by using a semicolon. "I fought the bear and won. Also, I never kiss plague rats on the mouth." In this sentence, your victory against the bear does not need to be connected to the plague rat, so a period is used.

INTERNAL - Use a semicolon to connect sentences that contain internal punctuation. "When dinosaurs agree on something, they'll often high-five one another; dinosaurs are all about high fives." If you'd used a comma in the sentence, it would have resulted in a comma splice. If you'd used a period, you'd lose the connection between the two clauses.

SUPER - Use a semicolon as a super-comma. "While searching for a good place to get a unicorn burger, I travelled to Seattle, Washington, Tokyo, Japan; and London, England." Use a semicolon if you need to make a list of items that are separated with a comma. This often occurs when listing locations, names, dates, and descriptions.

Again, this brilliance is excerpted from The Oatmeal's Grammar Comics , but the basic concept is one I've agreed with. Semicolons are not fancy ; they're just another tool with a specific set of use cases, some of which are quite common.

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You mentioned using semicolons in dialog. As others have pointed out, this is usually unnatural. But it is instructive to understand why it feels unnatural.

In real life, people rarely speak in fully grammatical complete sentences. Real speech has filled pauses, abrupt changes of subject, sentence fragments, excess or insufficient connective tissue, and numerous other irregularities. If we actually wrote all of these things verbatim, our characters would read like idiots and our readers would put the book down after half a chapter. The written word lacks the intonation, body language, and other nonverbal communicative channels which make ordinary speech comprehensible.

So we summarize and condense. We rewrite the incomplete thoughts that a person would actually say into the complete sentences that our readers can comprehend. There is an art to this. Do it too lightly and you have all of the problems I described above. Do it too heavily and your characters read like a textbook, with no voice of their own. Different authors, and perhaps different characters, will strike different balances along this spectrum.

Enter the semicolon. A semicolon denotes a short pause, less than a period; it connotes a thematic or structural link between two complete sentences. When you find yourself inserting these "nicely linked up" sentences into a character's speech, you may have gone too far with summarizing and condensing. Your dialog no longer reads like something the character could have come up with on the spur of the moment. Instead, it reads like something they rehearsed in advance.

Of course, there are times when a semicolon in dialog is entirely fair. For example, a politician's planned speech may well contain a semicolon or two. Such speeches really are rehearsed in advance, so the semicolon enhances the verisimilitude of the character's speech pattern. But when that same politician gets off the stage, you should expect them to revert to more natural punctuation.

In conclusion, banishing individual parts of the language from our usage is unhelpful. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the implications of our choices while writing. Careful use of punctuation, diction, and tone of voice are just as important as, if not more important than, narrative considerations like plot and setting.

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A semicolon is a complex beast:

You don't use it when you want an idea to stand on its own. You use a full stop for that.
You don't use it to tie two ideas closely together because if you did, you'd relate them with lighter punctuation like a comma.
You use it to relate two ideas weakly; it strongly implies there's a relationship between the two conjoined ideas but leaves it to the reader to determine what that implied relationship is.

As a result, it's difficult to use semicolons frequently without also using a slightly opaque writing style. When you use a semicolon, the fact that it clearly relates two clauses together without giving a direct indication what the relationship is necessarily forces your reader to read in-between the lines.

If you look at the list I gave above, the second bullet point relates its two clauses explicitly with the word because, allowing you to immediately understand that the second clause is related to the first due to providing an explanation for the first clause. In the third bullet point, the semicolon implies exactly the same relationship, but you are forced to read more carefully in order to understand that. You have to understand the two clauses separately, my implied context for writing this answer, and the parallelism in the entire list before you can be sure you correctly understand how the two halves of the sentence relate. It's not much more work, but it is more work nevertheless.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing because sometimes, that more opaque writing style is what you want. It's important to keep in mind that for writing fiction in particular, though, part of what you need to accomplish is making the task of reading your work pleasant and enjoyable for your readers. You typically want to write using a style that makes the semantic meaning of your story jump off of the page, allowing the reader to spend their mental energy on more sophisticated levels of your writing, such as the subtext in dialog or the thematic implications of characters' decisions. And, if possible, you want your writing to have a musical or poetic quality to it such that it "sounds good" in the reader's head.

Typically, a semicolon works counter to both of those goals. If you force a reader to spend some time figuring out whether your semicolon in, "I wanted to kill her; she had done so much to me," means that the speaker wants to kill her because of or in spite of what she had done, that's more work the reader has to do before getting back to reading in-between the lines of your story proper. And if you're trying to write with a musical quality, then forcing the reader to grind to a halt to understand a semicolon correctly can interrupt the rhythm (unless you're trying to get a slower effect).

All in all, though, these are definitely things to keep in mind at the level of being nitpicky. I would much rather read a story filled with semicolons, even awkward ones, that has compelling characters and themes than read a disjointed story with spotless prose. And every writer has their own style. Some people will never have occasion to use semicolons; others, like myself, will use them on occasion. You seem to like them, so more power to you!

When you finish your first few drafts of your story, you'll reach the point where the most important considerations aren't the structure or strength of the story proper, which have already been vetted and are largely set in stone, but rather getting the nuance and tone of each passage just so. This is the best time to consider the ideas of making your reading easy to approach and musical, and this is when you can really think carefully about each individual use of a semicolon. Until then, it's probably best to enjoy the story yourself as you discover it in the first couple drafts and not worry too much about the fine details of your prose, which you will thoroughly rework anyway.

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Semicolons are passé, as is writing with fountain pens and typewriters. Nothing really wrong with them, but the great majority of the reading and writing public has stopped understanding them or even wanting to. As they have ending sentences with prepositions.

By the way, research by academics studying various kinds of writing has found, repeatedly, that 7 words is about the most the general public reads in a paragraph before deciding whether to continue. And multiple sentences in a paragraph put most folks to sleep. Can't say that I blame them.

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I agree that flat-out banishment of any tool (adverbs, semicolons, etc.) is almost certainly wrong. Though many editors and agents will shake their heads if you use more than one or two semicolons in a novel. They are pretty far out of style.

Looking at your examples is instructive, though.

Semicolons seem particularly unnatural in dialogue. Nobody transcribing a conversation would ever give a moment's thought to using a semicolon; they're just going to write it as two sentences. The fact that those sentences are consecutive will typically be enough evidence that the ideas are closely linked (which is what the semicolon is supposed to mean, after all). If you read dialogue in popular mainstream fiction, you might also see the intentional use of a comma-splice as a way to run two short sentences together.

If you want/need a pause in the dialogue, don't use a semicolon. You need something that separates the ideas, which is the opposite of what a semicolon does.

As others have mentioned, an ellipsis can show hesitation or a trailing off of words. Dashes set off interruptions--either in the flow of an idea or in the literal case of a speaker being interrupted mid-sentence. A more significant pause, as you might have when a character collects their thoughts, can be indicated with a bit of business, like rifling through the files or pouring a drink.

It's easy to overdo pauses. Screenwriters are told, "Don't direct on paper." Let the actors/readers determine where most of the pauses go. Good dialogue rarely leans very heavily on punctuation. The right words in the right order go a long way. Save the explicit pauses for the really important moments. Less is more.

Outside of dialogue, the occasional, properly-used semicolon can give a passage an air of academic rigor. So, yeah, have at it in those passages.

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As with every element of style, it depends on context. In modern American fiction, semicolons are avoided; but trends do change, and old-fashioned modes of expression that were once considered effete affectations are coming back into fashion.

Personally, I love semicolons and use them frequently, but only in non-fiction, when I'm conveying complex conceptual content. I rarely (if ever) "hear" them in natural speech, and they seem excessive in most descriptive passages. They are really a conceptual marker rather than an oral one; and storytelling, much more than academic writing, relies on that strong narrative voice, even when not read aloud.

If you do use them, be aware that they will give your writing a professorial tone. I also wouldn't personally use them in the examples you gave in the comments (you might want to edit those into your question), so I would say that your friend has given you good advice.

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I myself have been criticised on at least one occasion for using too many semicolons in my writing. I hadn't noticed at the time, but I really was overusing them. It's one of the quirks of my writing style that I now try and consciously tone down, along with starting dialogue paragraphs with "the character did this" and my inability to go three pages without someone making some kind of witty or sarcastic remark.

My use of semicolons in fiction writing is generally limited to descriptive paragraphs, where run-on sentences are more acceptable. Often, I end up with two short sentences describing the same object; a semicolon is a neat way of linking them together without resorting to "and". (See?)

The only hard-and-fast rule I have when using semicolons is that I limit myself to one per paragraph. This stops me from overloading my descriptions with them and forces me to vary my sentence structure more to keep things interesting. But in general, I see nothing wrong with using semicolons. The trick, as with most things in writing, is not to overuse them.

EDIT: After a brief discussion in the comments, I'd like to add that it's also important to make sure you're using semicolons correctly. Part of the backlash against them is due to writers using them inappropriately. Semicolons are for linking related clauses, as I did in my example. They're not just fancy commas.

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