Semicolon - Literature

Literature

"Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it – who label it, if you please, middle-class."

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

Some authors have spurned the semicolon throughout their works. Lynne Truss stated that "Samuel Beckett spliced his way merrily through such novels as Molloy and Malone Dies, thumbing his nose at the semicolon all the way," "James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P. G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvellous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming up for Air, (1939)," "Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984)," and "Umberto Eco was congratulated by an academic reader for using no semicolons in The Name of the Rose (1983)."

Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country (2005) stated: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." In response to Vonnegut and Truss, Ben MacIntyre, columnist in The Times (London), wrote: "Americans have long regarded the semi-colon with suspicion, as a genteel, self-conscious, neither-one-thing-nor-the other sort of punctuation mark, with neither the butchness of a full colon nor the flighty promiscuity of the comma. Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons."

Read more about this topic:  Semicolon

Famous quotes containing the word literature:

    “There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.”
    —Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

    “The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.”
    —Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    “In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.”
    —Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)