Usage of Semicolons In English Books Down Almost Half In Two Decades (theguardian.com) 111
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: "Do not use semicolons," wrote Kurt Vonnegut, who averaged fewer than 30 a novel (about one every 10 pages). "All they do is show you've been to college." A study suggests UK authors are taking Vonnegut's advice to heart; the semicolon seems to be in terminal decline, with its usage in English books plummeting by almost half in two decades -- from one appearing in every 205 words in 2000 to one use in every 390 words today. Further research by Lisa McLendon, author of The Perfect English Grammar Workbook, found 67% of British students never or rarely use the semicolon. Just 11% of respondents described themselves as frequent users.
Linguistic experts at the language learning software Babbel, which commissioned the original research, were so struck by their findings that they asked McLendon to give the 500,000-strong London Student Network a 10-question multiple-choice quiz on the semicolon. She found more than half of respondents did not know or understand how to use it. As defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English, the semicolon is "a punctuation mark indicating a pause, typically between two main clauses, that is more pronounced than that indicated by a comma." It is commonly used to link together two independent but related clauses, and is particularly useful for juxtaposition or replacing confusing extra commas in lists where commas already exist -- or where a comma would create a splice. The Guardian has a semicolon quiz at the end of the article where you can test your semicolon knowledge.
Linguistic experts at the language learning software Babbel, which commissioned the original research, were so struck by their findings that they asked McLendon to give the 500,000-strong London Student Network a 10-question multiple-choice quiz on the semicolon. She found more than half of respondents did not know or understand how to use it. As defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English, the semicolon is "a punctuation mark indicating a pause, typically between two main clauses, that is more pronounced than that indicated by a comma." It is commonly used to link together two independent but related clauses, and is particularly useful for juxtaposition or replacing confusing extra commas in lists where commas already exist -- or where a comma would create a splice. The Guardian has a semicolon quiz at the end of the article where you can test your semicolon knowledge.
Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/... [theoatmeal.com]
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
For all intensive purposes the semicolon is becoming obsolete. This begs the question, why, but to me it infers that punctuation is not taught so well. I could care less and it does not peak my interest in the slightest.
Re: Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
"For all intents and purposes."
Looks like you haven't been to colleague either.
Re: Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that you only caught one error here is hilarious.
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The fact that you only caught one error here is hilarious.
I do not think that was the case: he was continuing the joke. Try rereading it carefully.
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Thanks, at least one person spotted it. :-)
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That you completely missed both his error and the joke, yet still felt the need to make a snide comment, is even funnier!
What illiterate morons modded your comment insightful?
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That you completely missed both his error and the joke, yet still felt the need to make a snide comment, is even funnier!
What illiterate morons modded your comment insightful?
Er... you missed the error and the joke. Note the "colleague".
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The fact that you only caught one error here is hilarious.
Man you got wooshed so hard I can't wait to tell my colleges about this at work tomorrow.
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"For all intents and purposes."
Looks like you haven't been to colleague either.
Hard to see humor on the internet sometimes, I agree, but all of the other subtle Engish errors should have clued you.
(Kudos on the phrase "Looks like you haven't been to colleague", though!)
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woosh
Re: Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit; his colleague turned my woosh back on me!
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Dammit; his [college] turned my woosh back on me!
FTFY
But I can't remember why I stopped using semicolons; perhaps I found them too ambiguous?
(Actually,, the only usage I can remember was for lists with complicated items, but later on it became easier and more clear to enumerate or reformat such lists.)
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haha
It's so funny. (Score:2)
Snarkily pointing out others' mistakes (and adding a bit of insult) is SUCH a popular activity on Slashdot that we have posts that bait people into doing this responded-to by posts that appear to be doing this only to further bait similar responses, just to try to trick posters into making mistakes that we can all point at and laugh.
I'm guilty too. Slashdot can really bring out our pettiness.
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My best and worst experiences learning English were with an Oxford trained professor, and a high school English Teacher. From the professor, I learned:
1. Make the book easy to read.
2. Chose terminology carefully. Particularly for new concepts, short clear terms make things much easier for the reader.
3. Choose a system of punctuation, and stick to it throughout the book.
On the other hand, my high school English teacher insisted I get a special style guide / book on how to use the semicolon. From this I
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The Elements of Style by Strunk and White takes care of both. How to make things clear and easy to read as well as proper punctuation.
It's the only book you need when you're writing anything (other than your research material).
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My best and worst experiences learning English were with an Oxford trained professor, and a high school English Teacher. From the professor, I learned:
1. Make the book easy to read.
2. Chose terminology carefully. Particularly for new concepts, short clear terms make things much easier for the reader.
3. Choose a system of punctuation, and stick to it throughout the book.
On the other hand, my high school English teacher insisted I get a special style guide / book on how to use the semicolon. From this I learned:
4. "Proper" punctuation in English is all about the style guide that the person is following.
5. Different teachers can't consistently teach a consistent "Proper" punctuation, because style guides differ.
6. Many people don't follow any particular style, or even know what is in their preferred style guide.
If you read your list from 6 to 1 the way you suggest you learned them, both teachers did their jobs. Everything is like this; you can't jump directly to step three, a professional makes up their own system that works best for them. Not without first going through steps, um, use this system a bunch of other people use, and this one, and this other one, and see how they all suck... well, that's not officially part of the lesson, but until you've gone through a bunch you won't understand the nuance of what ma
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I appreciate your work... but I don't want to.
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"punctuation is not taught so well"
And evidently, neither are idioms.
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A semicolon as I was taught can be used to combine two sentences. That is if you're using one you could replace it with a period and still have two complete sentences.
I'm sure if people were taught similarly then why bother with a semicolon - just use a period and start a new sentence and away you go.
It probably has its uses where periods can be used to delineate an actual clause where subparts may use semicolons to be easier to parse, in which case it's being used to create heck of a long compound sentence
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I don't like the first example. To me, having two independent sentences is better than using a semicolon. In fact, most of the examples I don't like. It might be a preference issue. I like the two separate sentences as they have more punch (to me).
Of course, I'm the same person who doesn't like how Lee Childs writes using that same style, so go figure.
Makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
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More recently I've been writing a lot more Python than C/C++/Java that I'd have been writing previously, so fewer semicolons is to be expected...
If you'd like to find a middle ground between the two, try Rust.
Re: A shame (Score:2)
Top of the Muffin to You! (Score:2)
Top of the Muffin to You!
I've largely stopped using semicolons (Score:2)
lest some idiot think I'm emoticonically winking at them, especially when one appears after a closing parenthesis (for example); which could appear to said idiot as a winkie-frownie, even though it's oriented the wrong way (some idiots orient their emoticons the wrong way).
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(some idiots orient their emoticons the wrong way)
Congrats on living up to your nickname. When we BBSers were inventing emoticons, we turned some of them backwards because it was amusing to us. You don't get to tell us how they are supposed to work.
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Those evolved into emojis; now we have someone to blame!
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So, we can call you the 'Al Gore of emoticons'.
Not so much, since I stated it was a collaborative effort. Gore arguably should have done the same, though he wasn't entirely wrong. It would have come off better.
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we turned some of them backwards because it was amusing to us. You don't get to tell us how they are supposed to work.
Thanks for confirming that emoticons do indeed have have a correct orientation.
Congrats on living up to your nickname.
I may be a cunt, but at least I'm not a twit. (-;
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3 to 1.. looks like he does. grow up.
3 to 1 what, chance you're a dipshit as well as a coward?
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( >
/ )
X
C===3
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even though it's oriented the wrong way (some idiots orient their emoticons the wrong way).
D:
Pppshah (Score:4, Insightful)
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From my mercifully brief encounters with the unhelpful parts of reddit the true ADHD-addled text structure is essentially a faithful transcription of a moron telling a story about something interesting only to them: A relentless torrent of short sentences without the mercy of paragraphs. Just a solid square of
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From my mercifully brief encounters with the unhelpful parts of reddit the true ADHD-addled text structure is essentially a faithful transcription of a moron telling a story about something interesting only to them: A relentless torrent of short sentences without the mercy of paragraphs...
It would seem that you and I have similar writing styles. We have at least one disagreement though: for me, capitalizing the first word after a colon - unless it's a proper noun or an acronym - constitutes a thud upon my eyeballs.
Re: Pppshah (Score:2)
A series of short sentences would be a wonder for my ADHD addled brain. At least for me, the greater problem is that I tend to produce sentences as long as the entire paragraph and forget to put any punctuation in it at all, leading the reader to run out of breath 63 times per sentence.
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They do technically allow you to ramble at greater length before hitting a period; but they impose more structural complexity you need to think about.
The conjunction "but" makes the semicolon unnecessary, since it is grammatical with a comma.
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Unnecessary is not synonym of useless and does not mean it should be recommended against.
As a side argument, we often incorporate unnecessary (redundant or meaningless) words to create expressivity. Also many letters (vowels in particular) in words are unnecessary in the sense that the words are still understandable after omitting them.
In general, and in the sentence you quote, the semicolon hints your parser that it's an appropriate moment to invoke a mental break in case you needed one; or that you you ca
Re: Pppshah (Score:2)
Rise in ADHD *diagnoses*. The people with it were there all along, struggling through life getting beaten at school, and fired from jobs. You know, just like there wasnâ(TM)t a âoerise in left handed peopleâ 50-100 years ago.
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Just like there's no autism "epidemic". It's just being noticed now.
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Rise in ADHD *diagnoses*. The people with it were there all along, struggling through life getting beaten at school, and fired from jobs. You know, just like there wasnâ(TM)t a âoerise in left handed peopleâ 50-100 years ago.
Tendencies like this are a spectrum, so of course there have always been some ADHD folks. Indeed, we were probably the dominant human cognition mode 20,000 years ago when ADHD would have been essential for kill-or-be-killed survival. Slow, focused, docile thoughts are for grazing ruminant herd animals like cows and accountants.
However, I believe it is highly likely that the recent pervasiveness of ADHD among young (and some older) folks results from the widespread unbalancing of the electrochemical state of
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ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder and is highly genetic. You're born with it and you die with it.
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Have you seen any statistics on the percentage of diagnoses and prescriptions which resulted from genetic testing?
My last sentence should have been more clear - I used the phrase "incidence of ADHD" because I was thinking specifically about statistics for diagnoses. I do not believe that current medical/mental health industry processes result in a perfect if-and-only-if mapping between the "cradle to grave" ADHDers you refer to, and the people out there who have an official ADHD diagnosis and treatment plan
Well, of course (Score:3)
They have to use all those semicolons in Java code, not to mention C and other languages. It'd make sense that they'd start running out.
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Funny, I immediately thought of Perl, where a missing semicolon is my #1 typo mistake.
Definitely use semicolons! (Score:5, Insightful)
Definitely use semicolons! Or dashes. (Score:3)
I love semicolons; how else would I legitimize what would otherwise be run-on sentences?
Dash.
I love the dash-- how else would I legitimize what would otherwise be a run-on sentence?
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Dash.
I love the dash-- how else would I legitimize what would otherwise be a run-on sentence?
These days that will get you tagged as AI.
TL;DR (Score:2)
Semicolon usage: up in C++, down in python (Score:2)
As a literature/writing nerd... (Score:2)
...I'm not sure how I feel about semicolons.
George Orwell once wrote a letter to a friend where he said that in his new novel, he was proud of the fact that he hadn't used a single semicolon, because he'd decided it was a "completely useless" piece of punctuation. (IIRC the novel was "Coming Up for Air".) Funny thing is, though, there *are* some semicolons in "1984" (which was his last book). Did he change his mind, or just forget about his rule? (He was pretty sick when he wrote 1984 so it could have b
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A dash is not the same as a hyphen. A dash connects phrases; a hyphen connects words.
There could be a whole other story about the loss of the hyphen. I recall reading an article about it decades ago; since then, things have only gotten worse. The article spoke of the ambiguity that results from the lack of a hyphen. For example what is a "high school building?" Is it a building that is a high school ( a high-school building) or a school whose building is high (a high school-building?)
Look around and you can
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And to elaborate further, there isn't just a "dash," but rather an "en dash" and an "em dash."
The "en dash" is used in ranges (e.g. "from [x] to [y]") which is typically numerical but can be words: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/hyphenanddash/hyphen [sussex.ac.uk]. So it is a cousin to the hyphen in that it can connect words, but as you said, is most certainly not interchangeable with a hyphen.
The "em dash" is the dash you mentioned: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/hyphenanddash/dash [sussex.ac.uk]. Wh
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I'm petty sure the distinction between em and en dashes only exist so that TeX nerds can scoff at inadequate typography while we stroke our neckbeards,
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Obligatory XKCD. [xkcd.com]
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I'm reminded of the funnier example from Archer, where he corrected someone on the difference between "child murderer" and "child-murderer".
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George Orwell once wrote a letter to a friend where he said that in his new novel, he was proud of the fact that he hadn't used a single semicolon, because he'd decided it was a "completely useless" piece of punctuation. (IIRC the novel was "Coming Up for Air".) Funny thing is, though, there *are* some semicolons in "1984" (which was his last book). Did he change his mind, or just forget about his rule? (He was pretty sick when he wrote 1984 so it could have been the latter).
I like Orwell a lot but outside of his issues with political speech (which are quite valid) he had some odd ideas about language. For instance, he had major problems with any words with "foreign" roots in the English language labeling those who used them as guilty of "pretentious diction" https://www.theguardian.com/bo... [theguardian.com] . Never mind this is completely natural and happens in virtually all languages. English would be an awfully boring language if we didn't have them.
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I read the Steven Poole essay you linked. It's not a bad essay, and he makes a couple of valid points here and there. I'd never noticed before that Orwell singled out the perfectly ordinary word "predict" as being pretentious. (Orwell wants us to use the "Anglo-Saxon" equivalent instead-- what would that even be? "Forecast"?)
Still, these are pretty minor nitpicks. If you look at Orwell's *other* examples of pretentious diction, they're all pretty spot on.
And a lot of Poole's objections to Orwell seem b
I'm going to publish five books (Score:1)
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AI will change that (Score:1)
Now how am I going to terminate my statements! (Score:2)
What I do is (Score:2)
Are they ignoring the grammar checkers? (Score:1)
I'd also like to point out that The Guardian ceased to be a journalistic outlet and became a propaganda outlet when they declared that their opinions were facts.
I'm already scaling back (Score:2)
I've stopped putting a semicolon at the end of code inside Begin..End blocks in all my Pascal programs.
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Clarity, that's why you use them! (Score:2)
In American schools most... (Score:2)
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Re: In American schools most... (Score:2)
Pray that you don't get a semicolon (Score:2)
Kurt Vonnegut not an authority (Score:2)
I don't know how highly people really rank Vonnegut's writing (in contrast to his storytelling), but I'd argue he's way off base here. I use semicolons when writing in a colloquial fashion because it sometimes is a closer model to how people actually speak. People don't always speak in well-formed sentences. The semicolon is able to capture some of the idiosyncracies of the spoken word in written form.
To me it sounds like someone complainin' 'bout Mark Twain's writin'.
Use em dashes (Score:2)
Use em dashes -- it makes the people believe you're using an LLM.
No surprise (Score:2)
Seeing how people don't even know the meaning of "get", semicolon use is even more difficult.
Re: don't ask americans.... (Score:3)
A scotsman taught us Americans how to pronounce aluminium. Apparently in other English word adjacent vowels don't create phantom syllables, but this one is special.
Step 1. Invent the English language.
Step 2. Refuse to speak it.
Step 3. Laugh when foreigners talk funny.
Aluminum (Re: don't ask americans....) (Score:5, Interesting)
A scotsman taught us Americans how to pronounce aluminium. Apparently in other English word adjacent vowels don't create phantom syllables, but this one is special.
The word in American and Canadian is "Aluminum" (no added i before the "um".)
"Aluminum" is the original spelling (and pronunciation), but Davy later thought that element names should end in "ium", and added the extra "i". (True for some elements, like helium and lithium, not true for others, like tantalum and platinum). So the American and Canadian version, aluminum, predates the British version, aluminium, by four years.
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As a general rule, when the British pronounce something different than the Americans, the American English pronunciation is closer to the original pronunciation. Either the British would Anglicize a foreign word that Americans would attempt to pronounce in its original form (e.g., "jaguar"), or the British English dialect drifted further from its original form (for example, when they forgot what the letter "R" meant).
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As a general rule, when the British pronounce something different than the Americans, the American English pronunciation is closer to the original pronunciation. Either the British would Anglicize a foreign word that Americans would attempt to pronounce in its original form (e.g., "jaguar"), or the British English dialect drifted further from its original form (for example, when they forgot what the letter "R" meant).
The same happens in Spanish. Many of the Latin America dialects are far closer to how a Spaniard of, say, 1700 sounded than how a Spaniard of today sounds. I understand this is a pretty common phenomenon; colonies tend to preserve the language more carefully, while people in the original country feel more free to let it evolve. Its surprising how well this holds up even when the colonies are subject to more immigration and contact with other languages.
It's not universal, of course. People are complicat
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The word in American and Canadian is "Aluminum" (no added i before the "um".)
Yes, I'm aware of the difference. I'm an American that used to watch James Burke, Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod in my youth. Hard not to hear the difference between Aluminium and Aluminum.
From a Latin perspective, "-um" is slightly more correct. As alumine/alumina doesn't end in an "i" or "ia", so you would use the neuter nominative/accusative singular form of "-um"; rather than "-ium" which you might use with a word like magnesia. But from the start about half the elements had the exception to the rule, and no
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I still remember our temporary maintenance manager in Australia. The previous one left in such a hurry the company couldn't replace in so they brought in a guy called Mike from a chemical plant in America to temporarily head the department. He looked so pleased with himself when he charged into our office and declared "I finally found out why al'y'all say 'aluminium'! You actually spell it with an extra i !!!!"
Man we all had a good laugh at that.
Aluminum and aluminium [Re:okay and] (Score:2)
Although both spellings are officially accepted, the trend is very much to use the international spelling not the US/CA spelling.
Google n-gram viewer suggests the opposite; "aluminum" use is greater than "aluminium" use by a factor of 2.75:
https://books.google.com/ngram... [google.com]
This is because scholarly papers are found with keyword searches, and if you use a weird spelling of a word people won't find your work.
More scholarly papers are written in American English than in British English, so that's an argument to use the American spelling. Verifying, Google scholar gives 445,000 scholarly references with "aluminum" in the title, 239,000 with "aluminium" in the title. Not quite as lopsided a difference, but still far more scholarly use of the American/Canadian spelling tha
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Like there arent silent letters or ridiculous pronunciations in British English as well.
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That's not just silent letters but an entire silent syllable, like Leicestershire.
Cholmondeley has two silent syllables as well as other silent letters, Featherstonehaugh goes even further and moves letters to a different place for pronouncing.
Re: don't ask americans.... (Score:2)
There are so many, but Launceston and Alnwick are a couple of my favourites. I work in Chiswick, and it hurts my ears hearing Americans try to pronounce it. This page has been deleted for some reason, but it should be mandatory reading for visitors: https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
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TIL: English used to have "plumming" to indicate water pipes.
Then some eggheads at Oxford decided that the Latin had a 'b' so English should have a 'b' and only low-brow morons didn't know that so the OED was changed.
So today we still have 'plumbing' because of some dipshits in the 17th Century.
"Trust the Experts".
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So today we still have 'plumbing' because of some dipshits in the 17th Century.
"Trust the Experts".
You're swinging at a 17th century straw man. Would an extra jello cup cheer you up?
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Or, clearly, how to spell "grammar" either. ;)
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But if that's the fight you want to pick, let's talk about the rhoticity of your r's, you presumably-British-person. Or rather, the lack thereof.