Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related The death of semicolons?

Sue, I'm going to move this one into Fanfic Related - just because this kind of conversation has always traditionally been posted there; it's usually of great interest to authors and readers.

One of my punctuation bugbears is the news tickertape on the BBC's cable news channel. I swear that they employ a troop of monkeys to type that. Hardly a day goes by without some glaring typo or punctuation error being included.

I think my favourite recently was when, for a brief time until someone noticed it, we had the news that Zany PF were beating up MDC supporters in Zimbabwe....

I, too, mourn hyphens. The reason why they were recently omitted by a leading dictionary was ludicrous. I'd probably still be outraged, if I could remember what the heck their reasoning was.

Text speak is useful - especially for someone like me who hunts and pecks letters and can take up to three weeks to compose a one line message (I've become an acknowledged master of asking coherent questions in as few letters as possible) - but it has to be in its place. It sets my teeth on edge to see it used in forums and as for this apparent trend some of you are reporting of it appearing in business correspondence... If I was still working there'd be a few explosions in my office, I suspect.

LabRat

Apropos of the general theme:

On Writing: Punctuation and Sentence Construction

Excerpt:

*covers ears* LALALALALALALALALALA

alcyone

That's another one that drives me crazy as a teacher. Okay - I get that you might miss a to/two/too/tow with spell check [yes, because I've spelled two tow once or twice and missed it]. But, seriously, SPELL CHECK! Of course, you could just learn how to spell but that would be too hard .

Carol

Would it be tossing kerosene on a fire to mention that I don't particularly like starting a sentence with a gerund?

This is a totally made-up quote:

The second gerund "saying" is not incorrect, but the first one isn't the best construction to use. The modifying phrase precedes the phrase it's modifying.

This kind of thing makes my eyes trip. And I see it all over the place, especially in fiction. I think authors try to tighten their prose but end up making it more difficult to follow. How could Lois laugh like a hyena and say anything to Jimmy at the same time?

And the examples I see are usually much longer than this. Hey, y'all, there are tons of books available to help writers improve their craft. And it is a craft. The gift of storytelling isn't universal and many just don't have what it takes to tell a story that pulls the reader in. I'm very thankful to be a part of this fandom, because there are so many wonderful writers here. I have received many hours of pleasure from reading the offerings posted here and on the archive, and I've learned a lot about writing along the way.

But we can all improve. We can all learn. And the proper use of the semicolon, the hyphen, and the gerund are all part and parcel of that process.

Oh, and let's not talk about "it's" versus "its" or we'll never get any sleep!

For some reason my first thought on seeing this was to imagine some sort of emoticon with a scythe, busily reaping semicolons as they died...

<snork> Love that phrase!



My own personal one is "_______ and I" at all times. It's like even if one slept through most of one's language arts classes, he/she did retain (part) of the lesson on "and I." Yet missed the part where "______ and me" is sometimes correct. The best way I learned it: take out the other person and say or read the sentence with just you in it. "Jack and I went to the park" becomes "I went to the park." "A dog barked at Jack and I" becomes "A dog barked at I." The correct phrase, then, for the second sentence would be "A dog barked at Jack and me."

(My main GE beef.)

'Toc <guiltily brushes a few gerunds quietly off lap and kicks them under the rug>

I actually teach my students to use semi-colons, but not so two woozy clauses can lean on each other. I tell them to use conjunctive adverbs to identify the relationship between the ideas so their readers don't have to struggle to figure it out. In fact, I tell them that the only time they can use a semi-colon on its own is when they find a comma splice (a comma joining two independent clauses without a conjunction in sight) on a paper they're handing in and have to make the correction without reprinting it.

Re use of "ur." My first reaction is, "Are you writing about Abram or the Chaldeans?" since Abram was originally from Ur of the Chaldees. As you can guess, I see "ur" and hear "oor." That's the other thing that infuriates me about text-talk: you can't tell when the word is supposed to be sounded out and when the letters are to be read by their names. It took me over a minute to figure out what "cul8tr" meant; I kept defaulting to a typo for "culture" and then to "cull-later." It baffled me because the c, u, and 8 are pronounced by naming the letters, but the remainder of the word is sounded out.

Terry, I don't mind beginning sentences with present participial phrases. When we discuss grammar in my classes, the only important thing to remember is that 1) the participle must refer to the subject of the clause immediately following it, and 2) since the present participle means that the action is occurring simultaneously with another one, it better BE an action that can occur simultaneously. "Sailing across the bay, a shark passed our boat" fails to meet the first requirement because the shark isn't doing the sailing. "Shoving his feet into his pants, he ran down the stairs" fails the second requirement because you can't run down stairs and shove your feet into pants at the same time. Otherwise, however, beginning a sentence with a present participial phrase is perfectly correct and allows writers to add some variety to their sentence construction.

That’s because YOUR English is better than a LOT, if not most native speakers, Lara.


I have found that many (so many) people think it’s okay to substitute a comma in place of a semi-colon. Arggghhh..... It drives me nuts.

Uh, semicolons? We never covered them anywhere. Not at school (only mentioning that they do exist), not at college; on reflection, though, I think that they might fit in most places where I habitually use dashes or ellipses. (By the way, was this semicolon correctly applied?) Or am I dead wrong here?

In my state because of the massive testing that occurs to grade the schools, grammar was thrown out the window to teach the standards tested.

Grammar sadly didn't make the cut as a skill for reading, which of course it is not, it is a skill for writing.

Well, we weren't prepared for any tests whatsoever. Still, I was taught the basics or more of four different languages: German (my native), English (9 years), Latin (4.5 years) and French (2 years). And in none of these did we ever get any lessons on the use of semicolons. So, how am I supposed to know how to use them?

Shelia, you are completely right. It's a symptom of my impending geezerdom that I don't always make clear and precise comments.

My problem with the use of the gerund to begin a sentence is twofold. First of all, as you so correctly pointed out, too many writers don't know how to use the construction correctly, and the misuse of the tool masks the occasional correct usage.

The second thing is that I personally don't like it. There. I said it! (The line to smack me in the head with the cricket bat forms to the right; no pushing, everyone gets two swings.) It's a personal dislike, probably brought on by my own abuse of the construction in my high school and college days. I recall an essay I had to write in my college freshman English 101 class that came back with so many critical marks that I lost the will to write for that instructor. One of those many red marks was for beginning a sentence with a gerund - improperly, if I recall correctly.

In the UK, "half-way" is hyphenated, but in the US it's one word. And no one writing in the US hyphenates "no-one."

Wasn't it Mark Twain who said we are two nations separated by a common language?

That's interesting. From what I hear (I was forced to take a "teaching college writing" course about a year ago at my institution) pedagogy at the college level has turned away from focusing on the mechanics of English--as least when it comes to scholarly writing which is its own animal (caveat!). The discouragement kids feel one of the reasons according to the professor.

Another is that there are considerable studies out there that show that bad writing, more often than not, is a symptom of disorganized thinking. People who follow that idea believe that as writers push their ideas into order, the actual mechanics start falling into place. That's relevant to those of us who can't afford to sacrifice the content of our courses for the sake of teaching grammar and punctuation. There's all sorts of sticky issues.

I suspect that has something to do with the death of the semicolon too.

alcyone

That's okay, Terry; I won't even take one swing because likes and dislikes are personal and, thus, allowed.

LJK, a semi-colon is used two ways in English. First and most commonly, it joins two independent clauses, which are sentence units that contain a subject, a verb, and a complete thought. My very first sentence in this post is an example of that kind of construction. Second, it is used to separate items in a list if the items contain punctuation of their own; for example, "The following faculty members became part-time administrators: Todd Ward, associate dean of academics; Ray Gregg, associate dean of career-technical education; and Susie Rogers, director of the Learning Center." Notice that a colon is used to introduce a list that follows an independent clause.

I understand not having the time to teach grammar, Alcyone. I'm lucky enough to teach developmental studies (college prep classes for adults returning to school from the workforce), and two of my English courses are built around grammar. Even so, students have so internalized improper grammar that I'm lucky if some of them can give up writing comma splices, run-ons, or sentence fragments after 2 or even 3 semesters in my program.

I like semicolons. I like hyphens, commas and other grammatical friends. I am not a fan of spell-check because their are too many correctly spelled words which are not included in my dictionary. I grow so tired of automatically adding my words that I've even included one or two oopsies by mistake, pharoah for example. One would think that the dictionary would be correct.


Elisabeth
edit: The worst I saw of Netspeak was on a Deaf/hearing board. People who spoke using the sentence structure of ASL with a combination of Netspeak and the codes used on TTY were impossible to understand. Luckily we had an interpretter or two, since the Deaf truly don't know English sentence structure.

I'm not too fond of spellcheck, either. I mean, there's not only the problem of the correctly spelled words that are missing in the dictionary, there's also the matter of the correct spelling for a certain word. Here's an example from my humble experience as a beta which the spellcheck didn't mind at all: 'in plane site' (as in 'He was hiding in plane site.' - sadly, I don't remember the actual context any more.) Of course, it should have been 'in plain sight', but since each and every word was an actual English word and correctly spelled to boot...

Things get even worse when you use spellcheck in two different languages. There is enough common ground between English and German so you can't rely on a spellcheck involving both dictionaries; sometimes the spelling differs in just one letter. It's worse, though, if you have the wrong dictionary in use because this pesky auto-correct function then tends to 'uncorrect' your spelling.