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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Semicolons (;) Semicolons must combine similar elements and are either used to combine complete sentences or items in a long, complicated list. Use semicolons in the following situations: Combine two ...

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 ...