That semicolon is a heart-bomb, a rare moment of gumshoe vulnerability. Trade it with a dash, a colon, and you’d weaken the punch. Instead, Chandler builds an extra beat into the detective’s ...

No piece of punctuation, though, stirs people up more than the humble semicolon. Too demure to be a colon but more assertive ...

Among punctuation marks, the semicolon is a relative latecomer, lagging behind the comma, colon and period, most linguists agree. Of course, punctuation itself did not become a standard part of ...

Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a “Seinfeld ...

A dot and a comma, and I can see why Aldus was pleased with himself. when he came up with it. ... that the colon introduces a list. The semicolon is going to refine what came before.

The semicolon has long been a divisive punctuation mark. Since its first reported use published by the Italian printer and humanist Aldus Manutius the Elder in the 1490s, people have both sung its ...

In the delightful Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, Cecelia Watson, a historian and philosopher of science, takes readers through a lively and varied “biography ...

The colon is always used as a prefix for items or points that are listed underneath it or after it. For example you might write a ‘to do’ list and you might say something like ‘TO DO: pay bills, ring ...

A comma brings a pause; a semicolon brings the drama. Sometimes, as with the opening line of this column, a full stop at the end of the first clause would be too final.