Semicolon
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world’s most polarizing punctuation mark
The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?
In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world of letters. But in the nineteenth century, as grammar books became all the rage, the rules of how we use language became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a prime victim. Taking us on a breezy journey through a range of examples—from Milton’s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letters from Birmingham Jail” to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—Watson reveals how traditional grammar rules make us less successful at communicating with each other than we’d think. Even the most die-hard grammar fanatics would be better served by tossing the rule books and learning a better way to engage with language.
Through her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that explains why we don’t need guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.
Customer Reviews
Important Reading, Especially for Academics
This was enlightening, and actually answered some questions a few former colleagues and I have had for close to a decade now about how these great thinkers and intellectuals of old seem to have no sense of grammar rules... BECAUSE THE RULES WE ARE HOLDING THEM TO DID NOT EXIST IN THEIR LIFE TIMES. People have tried shoehorning these writings into modern grammar rules, all to the detriment of those wishing to read these great thinkers and intellectuals in the present. Especially when one considers that these rules are not, in any way, uniform even at a given point in time.
Policing language appears to be - from the beginning - just one more way to oppress the poor, minorities, and otherwise “other” of the English speaking world. It was supposedly an attempt to make language into a science which it never has been and never will be. It was not until recent decades that parents even wanted grammar taught in schools, and even that was more a case of “we suffered through it, so can you.”
There is a time and place for “proper” grammar. Proper grammar allows what one has written to effectively communicate. If what you have written is unclear, that’s a problem. If it’s clear what you mean, nothing else should matter. In fact, it has, in our divisive times, because an accepted reason to completely disregard other points of view without ever addressing or even paying attention to those points of view.