Semicolon use is down, and its slide is making headlines. In the U.S., these punctuation marks are appearing in published ...

No piece of punctuation, though, stirs people up more than the humble semicolon. Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon was introduced in 1494 by Venetian printer and ...

A "study of semicolon use in U.S. publishing from 1920 to 2019 saw a dramatic slide." But the "semicolon will never completely go away, not as long as there are grown-ups around who still think ...

Punctuation marks may be small, but they carry a lot of weight—shaping tone, clarifying meaning and even signaling the writer’s personality. I adore the em dash; I tend to be a bit of a drama queen ...

According to recent studies, semicolon usage in books has halved in the last 25 years, and the majority of British students say they either rarely use it or don’t understand it at all. Blame the ...

Inspired by the passionate response to the semicolon’s supposed decline, this quiz invites you to test – and perhaps rediscover – your grasp of English grammar, from the basics to the ...

Not only are semicolons evidently becoming more rare, but young people are less aware of how to use them, according to a survey ...

Semicolons have long played a prominent role in classic literature. Journalist Amelia Hill notes that Virginia Woolf relies heavily on semicolons in her meditation on time, Mrs Dalloway. The novel ...

Seeing a semicolon is becoming increasingly rare; it seems that writers—especially young ones—don't understand how to use them. Instances of the misunderstood piece of punctuation in English ...

Language of literature Semicolons are becoming increasingly rare; their disappearance should be resisted A recent study has found a 50 per cent decline in the use of semicolons over the last two ...