Revising and updating BAA's Style Guide, we endorsed (and explained) the semicolon's use, with caveats: 'Semicolons mark a pause longer than a comma, shorter than a full stop. Use sparingly. If you're not confident with them, use a full stop instead, splitting the sentence in two.'
Yet no sooner had we 'saved' when articles by Trevor Butterworth in the FT and Ian Jack in the Guardian quoted all out attacks from growling Americans Donald Barthelme ("Let me be plain: the semi-colon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly, I pinch them out of my prose") and the Washington Post's Bill Walsh ("The semi-colon is an ugly bastard, and I try to avoid it"). The gist seemed to be that the semicolon is somehow, to quote Jack, "too effete, too genteel, too fuzzy a piece of punctuation to survive in such a rugged, demotic, plain-speaking country." Gosh! Ugly, effete, genteel and fuzzy. And here's us at ampers& using 'em all the time. What does that say about us? Perhaps that we know how to...
...punctuate a list following a colon, as here, from that very Guide: "So, choose the simple word, the one you'd naturally say: 'use' rather than 'utilise'; 'build' or 'make' rather than 'construct'; 'buy' rather than 'purchase'".
...connect two separate but related ideas within a sentence, as here: "As this example also shows, when quoted words form a complete and self-contained sentence, put a full stop before the closing quotation mark; when they do not, the full stop comes after the closing quotation mark."
Fact is, you could do almost the same job with other punctuation; but not quite the same job. The semicolon does exactly what it was designed to do - mark a pause longer than a comma, shorter than a full stop - and in a way nothing else quite can. Indeed, being deliberately provocative Trevor Butterworth's rant would in our view have benefited from one: ("Let me be plain: the semi-colon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly; I pinch them out of my prose").
So let's hear it for the beleaguered semicolon. There's nothing ugly about it. Nor is it effete, or genteel, or fuzzy. It's often abused, certainly. But it remains a valid and worthwhile tool; one which does a job no other mark quite does.
Want a writer with a full tool chest who knows how to use all of them, and which to use when?
Next month, the exclamation mark!
Alan
PS Incidentally, we'd no sooner sent off our last missive about winning Annual
Report awards when we collected another: M&C Saatchi, ARC
International category.