Semicolon Usage in British Literature Drops Nearly 50% Since 2000 (smithsonianmag.com) 67
Semicolon usage in British literature has declined from once every 205 words in 2000 to once every 390 words today, representing a nearly 50% drop, according to analysis commissioned by language learning company Babbel. The punctuation mark appeared once every 90 words in British literature from 1781, making the current frequency the lowest on record.
A survey of young learners in the London Student Network found that more than half of respondents could not correctly use semicolons, with only 11% describing themselves as frequent users. The average score on a semicolon knowledge quiz was 49%.
A survey of young learners in the London Student Network found that more than half of respondents could not correctly use semicolons, with only 11% describing themselves as frequent users. The average score on a semicolon knowledge quiz was 49%.
Quiz (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a quiz if you want to see your semicolon skills for yourself. Quite humbling.
https://style.mla.org/quiz-sem... [mla.org]
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In one of those, I would argue that the MLA style is wrong. Question four was a painfully long sentence. They suggest using a semicolon before the coordinating conjunction. Nope. The sentence overused commas where em dashes are more appropriate. They considered this to be correct:
Although Shelly wanted to go hiking, biking, and swimming on her vacation, she thought she wouldn’t have time for all three activities, since she was only taking a few days off; but, to her surprise, she managed to fit everything in.
If I had read a sentence like that in a book, I would have set the book on fire long before I got to the point of seeing whether the author used a comma or a semicolon before the coordinating conjunction. So for question 4, t
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Re: Quiz (Score:1)
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You use semicolons and then you type 'alot'...
Spellcheck is free and that's not a word.
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You use semicolons and then you type 'alot'...
Spellcheck is free and that's not a word.
Until enough people say it is; language is funny that way.
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If enough people call a fart a burp, it isn't going to smell any less. Using the wrong word in hopes that it may someday be correct doesn't mean they're currently correct. Though, I suppose we've already ruined education and standards for a wide swath of the world.
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Valid points, but "alot" may not be a good hill to die on in defending the evolution of language. It seems to make things more complicated. I've seen "alittle" and "abit": where do we end up? There are perfectly good words like "atop" and "afar", and if the "drop spaces" crowd takes control then confusion may ensue.
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I scored a nice 66.67% correctness. I guess I did quite well.
Question is, though: which English is this quiz for? It does not state whether this is British, American, Canadian, Australian, or Indian English, or any of the other million variations of English.
And, before you ask: yes, there's differences between the various Englishes.
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The correct answers in the quiz are valid for both Commonwealth English and US English.
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Run-on sentences are not necessarily bad, just discouraged in some style guides. The biggest problem with run-on sentences is that they can cause a lack of clarity at which point rather than reaching for a semicolon you should rewrite the clauses. Neither of the examples in the quiz lacked clarity.
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Two of those were run-on sentences which should have been neither a comma nor a semicolon. But if forced to choose, then, yeah; the semicolon would be the better of two bad choices.
I thought so, too, on the first read. Turns out only one of them was. The other was just confusing as heck. The first one was the vacation sentence, which I commented on earlier. The other one was this one:
I grow berries of all sorts, lemons and limes, radishes, and lettuce in my garden.
Which is a terrible sentence, but not run-on. It's bad because "of all sorts" breaks the flow. It should be rewritten as "I grow all sorts of berries, lemons, limes, radishes, and lettuce in my garden," or "I grow all sorts of berries, lemons and limes, radishes, and lettuce in my garden," if you h
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6/6
Why? (Score:2)
I'm not sure why; semi-colons can be cool.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I rarely use semicolons.
When I do, my grammar checker always complains.
Grammar checkers may be the reason for the decline in semicolons.
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I rarely use semicolons.
When I do, my grammar checker always complains.
Grammar checkers may be the reason for the decline in semicolons.
That's a good point. I notice the same thing.
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Then setup your grammar checker. You do know there are about 40 different settings you can set in Word to define writing style for the gramma checker right? Word doesn't complain about any semicolon used correctly unless you've set the grammar style specifically to not do so, for example setting it up for a formal writing style.
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You should take your own advice. The word "setup" is a noun, not a verb. Verbing it, the way you did here, should never be needed when all you need to do is split the word in half, producing "set up," which is a verb.
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Yeah I agree largely that if our only source of truth is Word telling us that our application of grammar rules are wrong based our long forgotten understanding of the fundamentals we learned as 8 year olds then perhaps society should ditch punctuation as an archaism to be misused inadvertently through enraging those grammar n*zis whom we unconsciously seek to antagonize.
That or shorter sentences, unlike the one above. But even what I wrote in the previous didn't even have a verb nor a subject but you got th
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But even what I wrote in the previous didn't even have a verb nor a subject but you got the point anyway.
Your very long sentence was perfectly cromulent.
I could diagram it using skills learned in Middle School English.
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Because; almost nobody uses them correctly.
What difference does it make? The point of punctuation is to clarify meaning. Is the misuse of semicolon's resulting in lack of clarity about what the writer is communicating? There certainly are situations in legal documents where punctuation has resulted in ambiguity. But its not clear how often that was because someone broke a punctuation rule.
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Gen-Z doesn't vibe with semicolons, but they ain't all about that Punctuation life either. Them people do vibe code like their lit on fire! They lowkey mix up "your" and "you're" or "it" and "it's." And tbh, we randomly capitalize Words for the aesthetic, y'know? Wtf is this, German? On Fleek, freak!
lulz (Score:1)
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I hope your post is irony. Otherwise, semicolons are the least of your writing problems.
tl;dr (Score:5, Funny)
tl;dr
99% (Score:5, Funny)
99% of everything I type ends with a semicolon.
The other 1% are comments.
Kernighan and Richie would be proud (Score:3)
Collect your gold geek badge on the way out.
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99% of everything I type ends with a semicolon.
The other 1% are comments.
More like 80% for me. I use Rust.
(In Rust, an expression without a semi-colon at the end of a block -- including at the end of a function -- is the return value for that block. This is used heavily in idiomatic Rust, which means there are lots of lines that do not end with semi-colons. The more you use short, single-purpose functions and the more you program in a functional style, the fewer semi-colons you use.)
Fucking python weenies (Score:1)
;;
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What about two statements on the same line?
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Maybe an indicator... (Score:3)
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With 99.99% of writers and people abusing "get" in every way, we're already on the down slope for a long time.
In dialogue concerning low IQ characters, fine, but use correct terminology outside of that in writing. People will never learn proper language skills otherwise.
"I don't use semicolons FULL STOP" (Score:1)
Says the current generation.
No longer the keepers of the language? (Score:2)
Judging from the British new papers, I'm not surprised at all.
I've noticed the butchering of acronyms (NASA as Nasa or even nasa) for a very long time, and other 'dumbing down' of their language.
It's as if they've taken ee cumming's style to a new extreme.
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Re: your sig: "III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIIIV IIVIIIIIIVIII..."
Is that 1;1;1.1;1;5.... or 3.1;4;4... or ???
Maybe there should be some semicolons around each roman numeral???
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ROTFLMAO! Open mouth, insert foot.
Semicolons are between a comma and a period (Score:4, Interesting)
Semicolons create a harder stop than a comma, to encapsulate a thought; but not as hard a stop as a period, which is a more complete encapsulation of a thought.
Implication? People are expressing less compound thoughts in sentences, they stylistically seek faster flow and harder stops perhaps? Does social media consumption impact how people write and express thoughts? Article doesn't say, but interesting result regardless.
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People are expressing less compound thoughts in sentences
People are also writing “fewer” less, and writing “less” more.
Hemingway (Score:2)
Channel Ernest, no semicolons.
Work Anecdote (Score:1)
Anon for job security.
My work has an NDA built-in to the contract that everyone in my position signs. It's simple and sensible, but it's there. One day, we were snowed out (midwest gets blizzards every once in a while), so an employee in my position went to Reddit and posted an AMA. He responded to everyone who asked and everything. He also claimed to be a top performer when he was bottom of the barrel, but we'll come back to that.
There was a new manager who is a bit of a grammar Nazi and had nothing to
Language evolves... (Score:4, Interesting)
Language is always evolving. The English language that would be more or less mutually intelligible to current speakers is only ~500 years old. The current grammar, punctation, and spelling conventions are even newer. Anybody who has read English language documents written before the 19th century by the most educated individuals of that day will see numerous examples of spelling that would be "incorrect" by today's conventions. As for the semicolon, it was only first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century (it was a new introduction when Shakespeare was writing his plays).
There are various ways to indicate a pause or disconnection within a sentence. Both commas and dashes can fill a similar role to the semicolon. Which is used is a matter of convention. The reduction in use of the semicolon seems to be at least partially a reaction to the overlapping use cases of these punctuation marks.
There's always going to be a tension between linguistic evolution and the need for established convention. If there are no conventions, then comprehension suffers. If conventions are too rigid, it can be difficult to convey the correct message. New concepts and circumstances may require new or evolving conventions. It's not surprising that conventions would change in the computer age.
Pascal (Score:2)
My own use has dropped dramatically since I stopped programming in Pascal.
Duplicate; i.e. it was mentioned last month (Score:5, Informative)
This is old news; last month it was already mentioned here: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/21/2122224/usage-of-semicolons-in-english-books-down-almost-half-in-two-decades [slashdot.org]
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Yup. If you follow the link in the article, it takes you to an article I read about a month ago.
wink bloat (Score:2)
I blame uinicode for getting rid of the two-character winking emoji (and for making it two bytes longer)
:(
In other news ... (Score:2)
The number of dupes on /. keeps constant - https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Did you mean colon usage? (Score:3)
I mean that would make sense, if colon usage drops by 50% you'll get semicolon usage.
Haven't seen one ... (Score:3)
Who remembers these in high school? (Score:2)
I can't remember ever being taught the use of colons or semicolons in high school (early to mid 80's). It wasn't until I took a technical writing course in college that the use of semicolons were explained to me. Others in the class noted the same thing about being clueless with regard to semicolon use. Were you taught the use of semicolons in high school?
6/6 but 0/6 in my writing (Score:1)
Obligatory quote (Score:2)
Appropriate Use of Semi-Colon Now Sign of AI (Score:2)
Semi-colon use is rare. Appropriate semi-colon use is even more rare. It's so uncommon that when I see it in an email, presentation, or website it triggers the "Did ChatGPT write this?" question in my head and I begin looking for other tell-tale signs.
OTOH (Score:2)
Em dashes show an increase of 25000% since ChatGPT for some reason is a serious fan of those.
Blame C programmers (Score:2)