Semicolon
About This Book
Cecelia Watson once held grammar rules sacred. Then she started teaching and found that strict rules are not always the best way to help people make words say what they mean, and that sometimes they are better ignored. She uses one punctuation mark to explore the problem: the semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell disliked it, while Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit loved it. It may be the most divisive mark in English, and many writers are too nervous to touch it. Watson asks why, when it works well, whether we have been using it wrongly, and whether any of it matters. The book is warm, funny and original, taking a quick tour through the surprising history of the semicolon and the power it can have in a writer's hands. Its message is that readers should lose their fear of it and take charge of their own language.
ISBN: 9780008291532
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