A little while ago, I got a critique of my first book's prologue from a fellow writer via an online critique group. It was mostly laudatory; all smiles about that. But one comment of his got my attention.
At one point, he noted that I use a lot of semicolons, and I use them correctly. But in his opinion, the average reader doesn't know the correct use of a semicolon. Their presence could thus make the text look awkward. In general, he simply writes two sentences rather than combining them in a way that might not be understood, and suggested I do the same.
Huh.
First, in case you didn't know. The semicolon is the following punctuation mark; see what I did there?
Now, let me clarify that isn't going to be a rant against the guy or anything. I respect his opinion, though I don't share it. He's not a bad writer. His story, what I've read of it so far, is pretty darn good. And he had a point regarding the sentence he commented on: it really did sound better split in two.
Nor is this going to be an impassioned defence of the semicolon, and its importance in written English. Stuff like that reminds me of the same things as fundamentalism: narrow-mindedness, and a desperate fear of change. I like using semicolons today, but I didn't always, and might not in future. It could be that in a hundred years the mark will be considered horribly arcane. Tastes change, as do languages. Such is life.
But. Growing up, I was mainly homeschooled. My education, such as it was, focused very little on the English language. One of my close cousins became an English teacher, and a lot of the time when she goes into grammatical terms, I won't know what she's talking about...until I get an example. Then, in most cases, I'll understand perfectly. So how is it that, lacking any formal education, I have mastered English grammar? How do I know how to use semicolons correctly?
Through reading.
I have always enjoyed reading; I've said that before. And allow me to state the obvious: the more you do something, the better at it you get. When I entered the second grade for my single year of school, I was already reading at a third-grade level. (They gave me a different book.) I remember seeing some of my classmates reading things like Dr. Seuss and thinking, you're still reading that? I got bored of that a lifetime ago. (Probably a year or two. You know how time crawls when you're young.) And if memory serves, I passed every spelling test with flying colors. (Math was a different story.)
My vocabulary also grew over the years. I've lost count of how many words I've learned from reading for pleasure - exacerbate, inebriated, remunerative, pedantic - simply because I saw them, didn't know what they meant, and had to look them up. Not sure if I could have done this for semicolons; I wouldn't have known what they were called. Maybe I just instinctively picked up that the pause was that of a colon + a comma. But I couldn't have learned about semicolons if I hadn't seen them in the first place.
Reading isn't just an eye-straining pastime. It taught me new words, new ways of linking them into chains of meaning. It helped me to better understand the English language as a whole.
And that is why I'm not going to stop writing semicolons. Because even - especially - if my readers don't know what one is and how it sounds...
They deserve the chance to learn.
Readers aren't stupid. If they were, they wouldn't be reading, and writing to ensure they understand what they read is not the same as assuming they won't. There's a fine line between clarity and condescension. Though it could be true that most will just skip over a word or symbol they don't know, at least a few will pause and wonder. I did. I even bothered to find out what they meant. I'd like to think I'm a better person because I did.
Maybe someone else will see something they don't understand in my work that makes them pause, and wonder.
Now, who knows what an ampersand is?
