SEMICOLON

Sub-titled 'How a Misunderstood Punctuation Mark Can Improve Your Writing, Enrich Your Reading and Even Change Your Life', here is the story of a small mark that can carry big ideas. Some people love it, others hate it, but most people just ignore it, often because they cannot remember the rules on how to use the semicolon. This warm, funny and enlightening and thoroughly original book takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the history of the semicolon and asks whether they are for snobs, whether they are sexy, the science of semicolons and English grammar wars, loose women and liquor laws, semicolons carved in stone, and how novelists from George Orwell to Kurt Vonnegut hold forth on its ugliness or omit them entirely accusing them of 'representing absolutely nothing.' Feared, pretentious, or downright trendy in the late 1800s, the frequency of the semicolon far outstrips that of one of its relatives, the colon. But there are rules as to whether to use a comma or a semicolon and in the new books of the 1700s, grammarians didn't hesitate to impugn the grammar of writers traditionally considered superb stylists: Milton and Shakespeare were chastised for 'gross mistakes'. The book follows a chronological path and follows the semicolon's place where our anxieties and aspirations about language, class and education are concentrated, and it is also a story about grammar and language more generally. The book shows how the semicolon is essential to the aesthetic appeal of passages from Herman Melville, Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Irvine Welsh, and other masters of English fiction and non-fiction. For all fans of Lynne Truss and the beauty of language and its rules. 212pp, paperback with facsimile examples and interesting graphics.