Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
The reason people feel that periods (for independent clauses) and commas (for an elaborate series) seem more correct than semicolons is because post-Hemingway style is telegraphic and has only gotten more so over time.
I happen to love the use of semicolons in writers like Thomas De Quincey, Henry James and Sir Thomas Browne -- the sense of symphonic and oceanic fluidity -- but most of the time, modern readers don't like or understand them. They've become a kind of distraction; they're treated as pieces of driftwood floating over what readers generally prefer to be a smooth flow of commas and end punctuation (see what I did?). So unless I'm deliberately writing in an archaic or meta style, or confecting densely referential literary criticism for an academic audience, I tend to replace nearly all the semicolons in my writing during revisions.
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(Bolding mine.)
This, exactly. I have a specialist degree in English lit, and very few of the courses I took were modern literature, so I know how to use a semicolon and I'm used to seeing them when I read classics/older novels. They don't phase me then. Without fail, though, they always pull me out of a book when I'm reading a modern novel. They stand out like sore thumbs, pulling me away from the story itself and making me aware of the author's writing mechanics.