Quote:
Originally Posted by Ditchy McAbandonpants
I have to tell you, reading that statement has sent me in to something apporaching an existential crisis, because I'm a total semicolon evangelist; if I write three sentences, you can bet two of them will use one. I love the damn things; I think they really help the flow and structuring of a paragraph, but hearing this from one of the most repsected authors of the 20th Century has opened up a large internal conflict for me. I'm going to have to take another look at the essay I'm writing...  |
I'm actually just the same. I use semi-colons all the time in my writing (dashes too). But they have caused me nothing but confusion in the long run. Over the years, I've had various teachers and tutors go through my essays and lecture me on how I'm applying them wrong, where I should be using semi-colons and where just plain old regular colons. Their instructions have always struck me as oddly conflicting, and I can't say I've ever been able to figure out the rules (I'm an English student, and I'm still as perplexed on the matter as the next person). They're far too deeply ingrained in my writing patterns to be going anywhere now, and they make your work look somewhat fancy, but I can't help but wonder if they're more trouble than they're really worth. That's why Kurt's words on the matter strike such a chord with me.