Ever since Kurt Vonnegut slandered semicolons (“They are transvestite hermaphrodites,” he said, “representing absolutely nothing”), aspiring writers have looked upon them with a mixture of confusion ...

It is a piece of punctuation that has divided writers and authors for centuries. Novelists including Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen have not shied away from using them, but that has not stopped ...

Of all the punctuation marks, the semicolon is far from the most popular. It's fallen in usage since it's heyday in the 1800s. Why was it so big then, and what changed? It might be that folks today ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The questions begin: Can I use a semicolon here? Should it be a colon instead? What’s the rule again? Oh foot, I’ll just give up ...

Happy National Punctuation Day, Internet! To celebrate, we've prepared a guide to the most hated punctuation mark of all: the semicolon. Although you won't need it often, it can add essential clarity ...

Once dismissed as a fussy, somewhat effete affectation, the white-gloved cousin to the callused, workaholic comma or brutally abrupt period, the semicolon might be coming into its own. Most people, ...

The age-old semicolon is dying out as Britons admit to never or rarely using the punctuation mark, a study has found. In 19th century English literature it appeared once in every 205 words, but today ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. Kurt Vonnegut despised them. Ernest Hemingway avoided them. Cormac McCarthy – the acclaimed American author who died this week – was ...

“The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops ...