Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark Audiobook (Free)

A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times from the world’s most polarizing punctuation mark

The semicolon. Stephen Ruler, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry Adam, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?

In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson graphs the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation tag, which for a long time was the trendiest one in the wonderful world of letters. But in the nineteenth hundred years, about Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Long term of a Misunderstood Mark as grammar books became extremely popular, the guidelines of how we make use of vocabulary became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a primary victim. Taking us on a breezy trip through a range of examples-from Milton’s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Characters from Birmingham Prison” to Raymond Chandler’s THE BEST Sleep-Watson reveals how traditional grammar guidelines make us much less effective at communicating with each other than we’d believe. Also the most die-hard grammar fanatics would be better served by tossing the guideline books and learning a better way to engage with language.

Through her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes helpful information to grammar that points out why we don’t need guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.