Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location

I thought this was going to be about Erik Davis.

 

Love the semicolon, although it can get distracting when used too often. It's about all I think about when I read Chuck Klosterman. I like his stuff, and it reads well, but I really do start noticing the semicolons -- and I think good punctuation is like a good referee.

The em dash is my personal crutch, a hiccup of mine. I go back and remove about half of them every time I write.

 

You're spot fucking on with Klosterman. He uses it way more than anyone else I read. In fact, I think I began to use the semicolon more after I started reading his work.

 

= The Times on a good day.

 

The Times knows its readership: It's the most e-mailed story on its site. Note the colon rather than the semicolon. ;D

 

Boots only loves the semicolon half as much.

 

And the article mentions that perfectly quirky book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" .

 

Aside to Bob Cook: You have a selective memory. Later in the same book ("A Man Without A Country"), Vonnegut also wrote:

"Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.
"And there, I've just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules."

Words to live by -- especially for a writer to live by.

 

For those who may have read the story earlier, there is now an entertaining correction at the bottom.

 

There may be a time when I need to use some form of exhort in a story, but I can't imagine a time when it's proper to use it twice in the first three graphs of the same story.

 

That's awesome. Along the lines of a misspelled word in a story about a spelling bee ...

 

Not at all. Educational.

love the correction, though