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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

Sentence length has gone down a lot, it feels like. So really, the semicolon has not been replaced by the dash, but by the period.

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When you need to write text for a wide audience, shorter sentences are usually preferable. Most business schools even teach briefness as an explicit target, as far as I know. That's quite different compared to the origins of writing, where the target were (usually) very literate people.

Briefness does not (and cannot) go against proper structuring - structure exists regardless of brevity. Comma, semicolon, period, new paragraph: the expressed thought has a structure and its sets of relative closeness are indicated through them.

Was going to comment this. Are there any great examples in all of literature where a period would not have been a good replacement fora semicolon?

As a side note, I am only a little offended by the idea that fiction writers should use semicolons to make their writing more literate or fancy. But I think simple writing is always better, even when you are trying to convey beauty. I believe great flowery literature is great in spite of the floweriness, not because of it.

Asking for a "great example" of punctuation use - any punctuation - is to miss the point, which is to smooth the reader's understanding of the text in the way that inflection and cadence are used in speech. As another commenter pointed out, well-used punctuation should be invisible. Only in its absence can it be properly appreciated.

Understanding language is not a strictly linear, one-word-after-another process, and these non-lexical clues all help us converge quickly on the intended meaning.

There have been several suggestions as to what might be just as good as a semicolon, but the period is a new one to me, and I strongly suspect that there are many cases where this substitution would interrupt a reader's flow. Given the importance, semantically, of the sentence, there are probably cases where this would corrupt the meaning.

I agree with most of what you said, but not that you shouldn't be able to find a good example. If the only good time for it is when it doesn't matter, that sounds like the worst and most pretentious parts of literature.

It is not clear to me how you could interpret my reply as being an admission that "the only good time for it is when it doesn't matter" - my claim is something quite different, that it makes a difference in a way that does not lead to great examples. Are there great examples, as you put it, of the use of the comma? If not, should we conclude that it doesn't matter and should be replaced with something else? A period, perhaps, as you say should replace the semicolon?

I will admit, however, that I doubt a misunderstanding of this magnitude could be fixed by punctuation.

Given the viewpoint expressed by the last sentence in my original reply, I have little doubt there are examples where replacing a semicolon with a period could alter the meaning of an expression, but I am just not motivated enough to go look for one.

If, as your final sentence suggests, you feel that semicolons are characteristic of "the worst and most pretentious parts of literature", then I have bad news about just how pretentious writing can get. Writing that badly misuses semicolons might be the work of a pretentious author, but it is mainly just bad writing.

Ultimately, however, I think the semicolon will disappear: if one's readership finds it strange and it interrupts their flow, then it is counter-productive. I do not, however, think this would mean it was a bad idea; its demise will be just a consequence of the ever-shifting norm of usage in language. Furthermore, the substitution of other punctuation for the semicolon, as noted in the article, suggests that it had a purpose that remains to be satisfied one way or another.

Thanks for providing a decent example at least

For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.

And the sad thing is, they don’t even know what the passive voice is! See G. K. Pullum, Fear and Loathing of the English Passive [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html]. Their unintentional hypocrisy is quite something, e.g.:

> … it makes little difference if you decide to look at prose written by the advisers on usage themselves. Consider the beginning of E. B. White's introduction to his revision of The Elements of Style (Strunk & White 2000). I underline the head verbs of the passive VPs … Six instances of transitive verbs appear here: took, called, required, called, known, and printed. Five of them are in the passive. That's over 83 percent.

A lot of that article feels like too much of a gotcha. There is a difference between "Alice died of a gunshot wound" and "Bob fatally shot Alice". The fact that neither one is passive voice according to the author's definition doesn't mean that people are wrong for being upset if Bob is left out of the headline. It really seems like missing the point to counter complaints that Bob isn't suitably blamed in a headline by pointing out that the grammar is fine!

But it also seems like missing the point for people to criticize that headline for a grammatical error (falsely!) when they really just want Bob to be named... which is exactly the point of that article, right?

They weren't criticizing the headline for a grammatical error (after all, passive voice isn't grammatically wrong). Rather they were using incorrect grammatical terminology to express their actual complaint: that the emphasis wasn't on Bob for committing murder!

I wonder how much it contributed to the recent rise of present-tense fiction, which I find unpleasant to read.

In my native language classes I was always told by my teachers to try to make shorter sentences. If I do a second pass, I always delete words or split sentences into two.

I have no data to back this up, but this feels accurate to me.

Anecdotally, I still use the semicolon when I write. Sometimes it just seems like the most natural way to bridge two thoughts.

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