Punctuate Deliberately

By way of rhetorical question in her recent Word column in the Boston Globe, Jan Freeman tells us why she thinks today’s male writers hold disdain for the semicolon. They are insecure about a loss of masculinity in their profession, she says. We can’t fault Freeman for sexing the semicolon, but she goes too far when she gives women the mandate to choose the use of the mark in their prose because it is, as the fair sex, nuanced and complex. As if today’s male writers that eschew the mark are void of nuance and complexity?

To get to this point, Freeman reports on characterizations of the semicolon by Trevor Butterworth in 2005—the mark’s nuanced and complex. And she references semicolon-hater Vonnegut and punchy Hemingway to illustrate a semi-point by Ben McIntyre in the London Times: “Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”

If either gender uses the semicolon because of its complexity or because it’s been sexed, think of your readers. Would they benefit more from splitting up those independent clauses and giving each its due measure of detail? Or would they benefit more from slurring the clauses together with a middle-of-the-road mark? If the prose doesn’t benefit from more detail or a coordinating conjunction, it’s possible that the author is playing punctuation polemics instead of writing with intent, let alone nuance.

Though joining two independent clauses with the mark can be effective, that doesn’t mean it is. And to justify its use simply as a matter of taste, as Freeman concludes, brings us into a world of punctuation relativism. Subjectivity shouldn’t govern the mark’s use. That is, it shouldn’t be used for what it is, but for what it does case-by-case. As the semicolon can clarify—splitting elements in a list that contains internal punctuation—so can it perplex. The mark’s best used deliberately.

As always, excellent semicolon usage welcome in comments.