Thread: Can we talk about "image" for a moment?

They're not for amateurs, that's for certain.

They exist exclusively for the purpose of telling you that your sentence has become convoluted!

You rarely ever see them in any ad copy or marketing materials. For this discussion, it is best to avoid them in web copy, flyer text or other promotional materials.

ETA: I hate them because the reader usually has to stop and ask for directions when digesting a sentence with a semicolon.

Originally Posted by mish_mish

They exist exclusively for the purpose of telling you that your sentence has become convoluted!

YES. Thank you!

My professors unanimously preferred breaking a long-winded semi-colon fest into, perhaps, two manageable sentences. To Zum's point, they're certainly not for amateurs or the faint of heart. But accomplished writers, by and large, seem to know better than to use them. On the rare occasion that they do, they use them properly.

Semicolon abuses were among the gravest atrocities I witnessed as a writing tutor back in my college days...oyyyyyyy

They exist exclusively for the purpose of telling you that your sentence has become convoluted!

No, they exist exclusively for the purpose of linking two phrases that *could* be two separate sentences but whose relationship is so close that you don't want the full stop. Nine times out of ten you don't need one.

And of course you don't use a semi-colon in commercial copy. That's just silly.

The semicolon can serve a useful purpose joining two independent clauses into a compound sentence; however, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

See my semicolon in the above sentence?

Yes, and I LIKE it.

Actually, one of the chief reasons you'd never do that in commercial copy (especially newspaper copy) is that it makes the sentence physically too long. Think how long the par would be in a column. A lot of people don't understand that how copy is constructed also has a lot to do with layout.

I'd rather see a semicolon any day of the week than a comma splice. *shudders*

Amen to that! Used properly, there's not a thing wrong with semicolons in many contexts. It just depends on what you're writing. They have no business in ad copy, of course, but they're often essential in a specialized context like legal or medical writing. I'm a legal and medical translator: take away my semicolons and you'd be tying one hand behind my back. (For one thing, the dreaded comma splice is considered perfectly decent in German. A semicolon is often the only available figleaf for it in English.)

Originally Posted by Zana

Amen to that! Used properly, there's not a thing wrong with semicolons in many contexts. It just depends on what you're writing. They have no business in ad copy, of course, but they're often essential in a specialized context like legal or medical writing. I'm a legal and medical translator: take away my semicolons and you'd be tying one hand behind my back. (For one thing, the dreaded comma splice is considered perfectly decent in German. A semicolon is often the only available figleaf for it in English.)

I was just gonna say and agree with you, Zana! In the legal field they are as common place and necessary as "aforementioned" "heretofor" and "AND NOW..."

Now I have to check and see if I have used semi-colons copiously in my web copy...