As innocent bystanders in the rapidly changing hellscape of the English language, semicolons have received far too much disrespect. It breaks our hearts.
The semicolon performs a very simple role: It replaces a comma and a conjunction. It allows us to connect two complete thoughts without the halting full stop of a period. Consider the following sentence:
Semicolons organize ordered lists, especially in cases where the sole use of commas muddles appositives and intensifiers, condense longer sentences, cutting down on conjunctions where unnecessary and visually separating clauses larger than comma delineation can permit, connect multiple related thoughts into one sentence where a period would be too harsh and clean up rhetorical garbage.
If that sentence gave you a headache, you know why semicolons are silent saviors.
Tragically, though, the use of semicolons has seen a steady decline since the early 19th century, dropping from being used once every 205 words in 2005 to once every 390 words in 2025. This unassuming punctuation mark has endured thorough abuse from some of the world’s most lauded writers. “Do not use semicolons,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. “All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
Ernest Hemingway, too, famously advised replacing semicolons and colons (and commas, for that matter) with the more declarative period. As an author whose minimalist style marked a literary era of emphasized masculinity, this rejection of semicolons demonstrates a rejection of subtlety and femininity. While short sentences and declarative periods are viewed as assertive, the modest semicolon, commonly used by authors like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, grants a softer end to a clause. A semicolon does not have the purpose of sounding strong; it fades into the background.
But periods and commas do what a semicolon does in the same way that music can be sung without regard for volume or tempo. You can sing a lullaby at the top of your lungs; the lyrics are the same no matter what beat you sing them at. Yet just as the softness of a lullaby gives it its signature soothing tone, the careful selection of punctuation gives writing its style. Shakespeare’s “to die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream” is a hesitation, a contemplation — it is neither the droning list of To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream nor the hiccup of a To sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream.
To a certain extent, authors’ criticisms are justified; writers should strive to be simple and direct by avoiding superfluous language and convoluted sentences that alienate readers. But these “weird little marks,” in the words of Cormac McCarthy, do more than just “show you’ve been to college.” A beat shorter than a period and longer than a comma, we lose our place in the sheet music of syntax without them. We lose dimension.
Really, though, the decline of the semicolon stems not from its controversy in writing circles nor from broad disdain for the punctuation, but rather from growing indifference due to a lackadaisical implementation in school curricula. A UK-based study found that almost 70% of students report never or rarely using this punctuation mark, with almost half of students not knowing how to correctly use it.
There’s another reason students don’t know how to write. The rise of generative AI has sentenced a cousin of the semicolon—the ill-fated em-dash—to death. Of the options of punctuation available to writers, the em dash is one of the most versatile — it directs attention to where the author needs it. It separates appositives and relative clauses — important ones — from the rest of the text.
The em-dash, however, has developed a negative connotation; now, texts that use this poor punctuation mark are often assumed to be LLM-generated “slop” rather than the product of human creativity. With readers and AI detectors becoming increasingly sensitive to em dashes, writers are starting to abandon them — not out of indifference but of fear.
In a beautiful grammatical buzzer-beater, the same decline in usage that nearly knocked the semicolon out of our punctuation lexicon has permeated the texts that AI models are trained on — making this mark a vestige of humanity in a world of unoriginal prose.
Semicolons don’t just make us original because LLMs don’t use them as often; they make us original because every punctuation mark gives our writing nuance. Our style is our poetry, in every piece of text from academic papers to creative writing pieces. Sure, we can communicate information in language as ugly as Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak — a clunky, pared-down version of English meant to shrink vocabulary and flatten complex ideas. We are human, though, because we can find beauty in our language. That nuance is what distinguishes our lullabies from our metal songs, our love letters from our cold emails and our lab reports from our op-eds.
The semicolon does not draw a sentence to a close. It holds its breath, waiting for the next clause to continue the message of the first. In the same way, the semicolon is not dead; it merely waits for us to love it again.
Marianthe Dresios is a freshman from Carlsbad, Calif. studying Molecular and Cellular Biology and Applied Mathematics and Statistics. Omer Korkmaz is a freshman from Franklin Lakes, N.J. studying Molecular and Cellular Biology and Medicine, Science and the Humanities.
