The Semi-Colon under Attack

Since writing about semi-colons last month, I've read an extract from a book published in Quest, the journal of the Queen's English Society, no less, which to my astonishment spoke out for the extinction of this species of punctuation. To quote: 'Semicolons are pretentious and overactive.' Hmmm - 'semi-colons' should be hyphenated, you know. 'These days one seems to come across them in every other sentence.' Oh yeah? Not if you read Philippa Gregory. 'If the undergraduate essays I see are representative, we are in the midst of an epidemic of semicolons.' I haven't had one undergraduate who hasn't had to be reminded what a semi-colon is and encouraged to use it. 'I recognise that my reaction is extreme. But the semicolon has become so hateful to me that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.' What guff!

Here is a 'sentence' from Philippa Gregory's The Queen's Fool. 'I tried to fight it off, this court would be the worst place in the world to tell the truth.' That's only one of very many examples from this book of separate sentences joined by commas. In one there were about three sentences: I wish I had noted it down but I didn't. This line I've quoted is, of course, two sentences, and is exactly the right occasion for the use of a semi-colon.

It's a good book and I enjoyed it, but my enjoyment was ruined by having to re-read so many sentences badly punctuated. Of course, my eye was keen for semi-colons and I came across about three; on each occasion it was wrongly used and should have been a comma. As John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction, we must never disturb the fictional dream. Because of the lack of stops or semi-colons, I could never fully enter her dream. Other reviewers say the same, that the story stretches credibility, never completely grips, etc. Could it be merely because of punctuation? It's possible. What a salutary lesson.