A page-turning, existential romp through the life span and times from the world’s most polarizing punctuation tag

The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When could it be effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we also care?

In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson graphs the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for a long time was the trendiest one in the wonderful world of letters. However in the nineteenth hundred years, about Semicolon: DAYS GONE BY, Present, and Long term of a Misunderstood Mark as grammar books became extremely popular, the guidelines of how exactly we make use of vocabulary became both stricter and even more confusing, with the semicolon a excellent victim. Acquiring us on the breezy trip through a range of examples-from Milton’s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Words from Birmingham Jail” to Raymond Chandler’s THE BEST Sleep-Watson reveals how traditional sentence structure guidelines make us much less effective at communicating with one another than we’d think. Even the most die-hard sentence structure fanatics will be better offered by tossing the rule books and learning an easier way to activate with language.

Through her rollicking biography from the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that clarifies why we don’t need guides whatsoever, and refocuses our attention around the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.