No piece of punctuation, though, stirs people up more than the humble semicolon. Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon was introduced in 1494 by Venetian printer and ...

Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a “Seinfeld ...

Effective written communication is crucial in the digital age. Common punctuation errors can undermine credibility in professional and academic settings. Mastering comma usage, apostrophes, semicolons ...

Not only are semicolons evidently becoming more rare, but young people are less aware of how to use them, according to a ...

Yet when you put the punctuation mark itself into the database, rather than the word “semicolon”, you get a quite different result – one that looks very much like a steady decline. A brief history of ...

The colon is always used as a prefix for items or points that are listed underneath it or after it. For example you might write a ‘to do’ list and you might say something like ‘TO DO: pay bills, ring ...

This sentence is an example of a comma splice, you shouldn’t use commas this way. Technically, a semicolon can link independent clauses. But they shouldn’t because — well, yuck.

But that’s a very different matter.) In many decades as a professional writer, I’ve used semicolons only a handful of times. I almost always use one of these alternatives instead.

To use the earlier example: “When you go to the store, please get: cheese, oranges, bread, and crackers” is incorrect. The content before the colon should be an independent clause.

Colons and semicolons are the indie rock of punctuation marks. They’re not mainstream-popular like the period. They aren’t obvious and eager-to-please like the exclamation mark. They’re not ...