|
People who expect the English language to have absolute rules without (i) exceptions or (ii) the requirement of painfully logical usage must find a copy immediately of The Reader over Your Shoulder, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. You don't have to agree with every decision they make, but you do have to understand which decisions are being made and why.
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.
|