The Grace of the Semicolon
Project Semicolon
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"Project Semicolon was founded in 2013 by Amy Bleuel of Green Bay, Wis., who lost her father to suicide. He, like 34,000 Americans every year, decided to cut his own story short. In his memory, Bleuel is encouraging Americans to take a different route—and she’s using the semicolon to get her point across, turning it into a symbol of hope and continuation."
"A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to,” Project Semicolon’s site says. “The author is you and the sentence is your life.” - Paul Assay, The Best Use of the Semicolon Ever, Patheos |
Adventures of the Semicolon
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In Semicolon: The Past, Present and Future Uses of a Misunderstood Mark, Cecelia Watson explains that there are no formal rules for using the semicolon. She offers many different uses of the mark, including the following three, to which I add a fourth: an icon for process theology.
Piling on clauses A way of saying to the reader who is carrying a bag of groceries: "Here, I know you have a lot, but can you take another bag." Distilling Anxiety "A place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink." Collecting themes "The semicolons are Moby-Dick’s joints, allowing the novel the freedom of movement it needed to tour such a large and disparate collection of themes. … Just as sailors needed instruments to wander out past sight of shore, Moby-Dick required writing technologies that could allow it to venture out beyond the genre constraints of its time." |
"In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world of letters. But in the nineteenth century, as grammar books became all the rage, the rules of how we use language became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a prime victim. Taking us on a breezy journey through a range of examples—from Milton’s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letters from Birmingham Jail” to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—Watson reveals how traditional grammar rules make us less successful at communicating with each other than we’d think. Even the most die-hard grammar fanatics would be better served by tossing the rule books and learning a better way to engage with language. Through her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that explains why we don’t need guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication."
Moving Forward
In the beginning was the semicolon. It was in God and it was God. It consisted of possibilities in God's mind which may or may not be actualized. As isolated from the world the semicolon sits in naked beauty, enjoying the wisdom of uncertainty. It yearns for actualization. The semicolon is God's love for the world. It takes the form of fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness, relative to the situation at hand.
The semicolon, then, can be an icon for divine grace. Of course the semicolon is not the only religious icon we need. We need crosses and mandalas and stars and moons, too. But we also need images that invite us to say: "I don't know; let me pause for a minute and see what comes next.God enjoys a kind of expectancy, albeit in a divine kind of way.
The good news is that God is not a dictator. She operates through love not power. In trying times, in the quietness of our own hearts, she whispers:
Let's pause for a moment. Let's be open to fresh possibilities and see what happens. I'm looking forward to the next moment, too.
When we hear this voice, however dimly, and respond in faith, we take our step into, and help create, the next clause. God feels the happiness with us, and we both move forward.
The good news is that God is not a dictator. She operates through love not power. In trying times, in the quietness of our own hearts, she whispers:
Let's pause for a moment. Let's be open to fresh possibilities and see what happens. I'm looking forward to the next moment, too.
When we hear this voice, however dimly, and respond in faith, we take our step into, and help create, the next clause. God feels the happiness with us, and we both move forward.
What would my English Teacher Say?
I don't think I ever learned to use semicolons in high school or college. My teachers were like those of Mary Norris:
In college, whenever I used a semicolon in a paper, it came back to me with a big red circle around the offending member. I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period. -- Mary Norris in The New Yorker, Semicolons: So Tricky
Mary Norris changed her mind. She writes:
I think the semicolon is more easily understood if it is defined in relation to the colon rather than to the comma...“Its main role is to indicate a separation between two parts of a sentence that is stronger than a comma but less strong than dividing the sentence in two with a full stop…. She looked at me; I was lost for words.”
In college, whenever I used a semicolon in a paper, it came back to me with a big red circle around the offending member. I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period. -- Mary Norris in The New Yorker, Semicolons: So Tricky
Mary Norris changed her mind. She writes:
I think the semicolon is more easily understood if it is defined in relation to the colon rather than to the comma...“Its main role is to indicate a separation between two parts of a sentence that is stronger than a comma but less strong than dividing the sentence in two with a full stop…. She looked at me; I was lost for words.”