A writer who doesn’t know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon is like a gardener who can’t tell the difference between a conservatory and a shed.
That’s what I used to say.
Because I used to be very hardline about this, and perhaps a little aggressive.
But when you’re hardline in any way, you risk getting caught out by your own strictures.
So, before anyone does point the grammatical or green finger, I’d like to say that my approach has since softened — and that I know there are ways of writing without using either colon or semi-colon; and therefore writers who avoid them entirely, because they think they’re crap, don’t really need to know the difference.
I’ve seen twitter threads in which writers take turns outdoing one another in their contempt for semi-colons and all who use them.
Their invective can be quite inventive.
My view is this: we don’t need fewer punctuation marks, we need more.
I’m very fond (perhaps too fond) of the em dash — but would also (without being affected) like to have other options.
And what I tend to assume is that every single resource that writers of the past have left us with, including every single word in the Oxford English Dictionary, may — at some point — be useful to a contemporary writer, and that writer may very well be me.
I try not to set general bans on anything. (Apart from describing any part of my life as a journey.)
This is what Kurt Vonnegut famously said on today’s subject —
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
I love Vonnegut in many ways, but think we can now let this fall flat.
Why would Kurt choose to be negative about semicolons in this heterosexually strutting way — by being aggressively, limitedly dismissive of ‘transvestite hermaphrodites’?
I’d say it’s evidence of a real barrack room fear of being seen as anything other but a real man’s man.
Vonnegut is saying that semi-colons are between male and female, both in body and in dress. They’re queer.
I see that queerness as nothing but welcome and wonderful.
He also says that the semi-colon’s way of grammatical being is a negation of the possibility of firm meaning.
That’s wrong, even on his own terms. What it’s expressing, very accurately, is nuanced degrees of in-betweenness, of additionalness to the binary.
Any good writer should be, at the desk, indeterminate. Hanging on to your male- or femaleness, out of fear, will just make you a bad writer of whatever you’re anxiously asserting you’re not.
You should be open to being everything, including animals and atoms.
But this is to accept Vonnegut’s characterisation of semi-colons, which I don’t think we need do.
Let’s say there’s a possible use for them as grammatically exact marks on the page; they splice together two complete statements, optionally.
It’s not hard, is it, to imagine a first person narrator who is best characterised by an addiction to semi-colons? Even Vonnegut might want to use them to demonstrate how disgustingly college-educated his speaker is.
It’s undeniable that semi-colons make lots of readers feel awkward and, perhaps, inadequate. They’re not quite sure that to do with them.
So if you’re trying to write for as big an audience as possible, then you should probably find other ways of getting stuff into your sentences. Most likely by writing shorter, separate, less ramblesome sentences. (Look at Lee Child’s punctuation.)
However, for those writers that would like to get a grasp, in non-grammatical language, of the distinction here’s my best attempt:
If the sentence is a house with a garden, then the colon is a conservatory and the semi-colon is a shed.
This conservatory, I should add, is built on the back of the house and entered directly from the living room or the kitchen; it is being used as a greenhouse; the shed is at the bottom of the garden; not a huge garden, though.
Let me explain a little more, or try to.
Both the colon and semi-colon are storage devices; each allows the writer to get more stuff into the sentence: extra thoughts, lists of relevant objects. But they work in different ways.
The colon is lead up to by the whole of the preceding sentence, depends entirely upon it for support, and when you reach it you pass swiftly through it — like the door into a conservatory. Inside the conservatory, after the colon, everything is neatly arranged in rows, on shelves, for visibility and ease of use: flowers, cuttings, packets of seed, spraycans, etcetera. (Etcetera is probably the equivalent of the cat-flap.)
The semi-colon, like the shed, is an independent structure that can stand up by itself; it is separated from the house by a short walk; it too contains stuff that needs to be stored (tools of various sorts; flowerpots, both empty and full – for example, ones containing wintering bulbs; gardening gloves and those old shoes that aren’t good for anything else; the lawnmower) but what that stuff is isn’t so easy to make out from outside; the arrangement is more higgledy-piggledy, but that’s how some people like to store things, isn’t it?
So, there you are. Easy to imagine, easy to remember —
C = Colon = Conservatory
S = Semi-colon = Shed.
Here’s a writing exercise —
Try to write a sentence (or two or three sentences) that can be punctuated three ways – with colon, semi-colon and without either.
A version of this appeared in my previous blog, Writing and Shit.