by Andi Benjamin
From the overuse of em dashes by ChatGPT to the longstanding Oxford comma wars, there’s no shortage of interesting topics for editors to debate in 2025. But one that’s worth exploring, having divided grammarians for centuries, is the semicolon.
The semicolon provokes strong opinions. American writer Paul Robinson has called them “pretentious” (p. 159), while Mark Twain has referred to them as “the damned half-developed foetus!” (p. 97).
It’s this controversy that led me to Cecelia Watson’s Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark (2019).
The history of the semicolon
The semicolon came to be in 1494, when Aldus Manutius, a Venetian painter and publisher, first used it to mark a pause longer than a comma but shorter than a colon. Manutius was, along with his fellow Italian humanists, open-minded and flexible; they felt that “each writer should work out his punctuation for himself.” They understood punctuation as an extension of thought itself, rather than a fixed set of rules.
But this mentality changed in the 18th and 19th centuries, when grammarians started imposing increasingly rigid rules on both punctuation specifically and language more broadly. During this period, grammar evolved from a means of expression into a tool for assessing correctness.
Some writers, however, resisted these constraints. Watson turns her attention to those authors who eschewed traditional punctuation in favour of creativity. She cites Raymond Chandler’s frequent use of the semicolon in his letters to The Atlantic, which effectively produced “a steadiness of rhythm in his prose” (p. 111). She also closely examines Herman Melville’s frequent use of the semicolon in Moby-Dick (there’s one semicolon for every fifty-two words in the book) (p. 136), and Irvine Welsh’s reliance on the punctuation mark in Trainspotting as less of a pause and more of “an instrument of quickness, a little springboard that launches you rapidly from thought to thought” (p. 118).
Watson then delves into modern rulebooks of the kind editors are familiar with, such as The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and The Chicago Manual of Style. She sees these guides as a continuation of the 18th-century preoccupation with rules and correctness, and maintains that the best writers use the semicolon intuitively rather than prescriptively.
Grammar as moral code
Beyond covering the history of the semicolon, Watson explores the moral dimensions of the mark and of punctuation in general. With a philosophical lens, she asks questions like:
- Why are we so obsessed with clarity?
- What does it mean to follow rules when the rules themselves are arbitrary?
- How does this apply beyond language to areas like law, morality, and technology?
Watson notes that in the 18th and 19th centuries, grammar was becoming a moral project. Robert Lowth, who wrote the 1758 book A Short Introduction to English Grammar, famously announced that his aim was to “lay down rules” for grammar (p. 25). He criticized such offenders as Jonathan Swift, John Milton, and Shakespeare (!).
Indeed, at that time, writing “correctly” was a sign of self-control and virtue. And against this stern backdrop, grammar became a means of policing behaviour – reinforcing educational and class hierarchies in the process.
Using rules to manage ambiguity
Watson argues that our strict adherence to grammatical rules reflects a broader societal discomfort with ambiguity. The hostility we see directed at the semicolon (by Twain, for instance) stems from the mark’s refusal to take a definitive stance. It “both connects and separates at the same time,” hovering in a state of perpetual in-betweenness. This can feel unsettling, because it challenges familiar binaries like good vs. bad and right vs. wrong. As Watson puts it, “the semicolon resists absolutism.” In doing so, it both challenges and frustrates “those who crave certainty.”
This theory rings true to me. There is evidence of our discomfort with ambiguity in many facets of life. Our political climate encourages us to view people as heroes or villains, pure or corrupt, and public debates demand that we pick a side – for or against. But to embrace the semicolon is to resist that impulse and to dwell inside the messy reality where answers are unclear and complexity is unavoidable.
Closing thoughts
In the end, Watson’s book reminds us that punctuation isn’t just about marks on a page; it’s about how we navigate through a complex world. Semicolon is a meditation on rules, asking the reader to consider what they mean, when they should be followed, and when they should be bent or even flouted. It suggests – and I’m inclined to believe – that one of the most profound things we can do as editors, writers, and human beings, is to embrace nuance and leave ample room for the in-between.
Andi Benjamin, MA, JD, is a legal editor and writer based in Toronto. She is the owner of AB Edits.
This article was copy edited by Elisa Petrovich. She is a freelance copy editor and proofreader based in the GTA and works primarily with fiction and short story collections.
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