For the Love Of All You Hold Dear: "Restore the semicolon to journalism; before it’s too late"
From Poynter:
Maybe it’s the oppressive Florida heat and humidity, but I find myself in a mischievously contrarian mood these days. First I flew the flag of the Oxford comma. Then I raised the roof on behalf of the passive voice.
So why not try for a trifecta: a proposal that we restore the
undervalued semicolon to its proper place in journalism – ahead of the
dash.
It could be that I’ve been shaped by the influence of one of my
favorite writers, more importantly, the richest writer in the world:
J.K. Rowling. If a woman now worth more than the Queen of England
peppers her prose with semicolons, why should we deny their power and
influence.
Writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, Rowling has given us The Cuckoo’s Calling, a detective mystery with her flawed and injured hero Cormoran Strike. Check out this passage:
An overdose had simply seemed consistent with the trend
of Leda’s life; with the squats and the musicians and the wild parties;
with the squalor of her final relationship and home; with the constant
presence of drugs in her vicinity; with her reckless quest for thrills
and highs. Strike alone had asked whether anyone had known his mother
had taken to shooting up; he alone had seen a distinction between her
predilection for cannabis and a sudden liking for heroin; he alone had
unanswered questions and saw suspicious circumstances. But he had been a
student of twenty, and nobody had listened.
For the record, that’s six semicolons in a paragraph of 101 words,
about one every 17 words. Let it be known, that no language was injured
in the making of this paragraph.
If you’d like to brush up on your semicolon skills, please follow
this argument, which I have adapted here from a chapter of the book The Glamour of Grammar:
Come to think of it, the semicolon does look a little like a colon
with a polyp. In truth, it is probably used more often these days in
winking emoticons 
than as an alternative to the period or the comma. Maybe because a
period sits atop a comma in the semicolon, it sends off a “neither here
nor there” aura, threatening me with its indifference.
Whenever I’m having unsettled thoughts about punctuation, I turn to the
work of Tom Wolfe. It was in the 1960s, after all, when Wolfe and his
buddies began to bust the boundaries of conventional nonfiction. Among
those innovations was a tendency to use punctuation like hot spice in a
Cajun stew. A little this!…A little that*!*!…Bada boom!!!
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