We salute the semi-colon!

I assessed Advanced Creative Writing for the first time this year and before I commenced this task, I wondered how anyone might ascribe a mark to something so…well… creative, but once I’d started, it became patently clear what we were really looking for: there are those who have control of language and then there are those who do not.  With great pieces of writing, there’s a sense of purposeful shape, carefully crafted, each word exceptionally chosen and placed just so.  I must have read about two hundred pieces and have to say that they ranged from the sublime ( and I mean sublime-I couldn’t believe the insight and imagination of some seventeen year olds) to the down-right awful.  What was made clear to me was that there is no tool in the writer’s toolbox which is superfluous in the quest to find the authorial voice. 

I remember a boy-David-who was seventeen and trying his best to get an A in his Higher English in order to get into Medicine at a prestigious Scottish university.  He asked me a question that I mulled over-and am still mulling over-nearly five years later, enough time for David to have graduated.  He asked me if it was important to know “big words”.  For “big words” read, “Words that I do not currently have in my vocabulary.”  My instinct was to say, “Yes” and explained that language is the only thing we have to make our thoughts, our ideas, concrete, to facilitate communication, which is as true and meaningful as it can be.  The more words we know, the better we can be in expressing those experiences, ideas and so on.  It is something I do believe: perhaps in a near existential way, as we search to acquire enough language to express ourselves, experience can be limitless.  Luckily we never have to come to the end of learning, acquiring, expressing, so we don’t fall into that existential abyss, like the man who reads all the books in the library in order to attain complete knowledge.  I also said that beyond the concrete language that we have at our disposal, we also have metaphor, which makes our expression infinite.  Imagine that our feelings and thoughts are a muddle of intangible threads.  When we feel extremes of emotion, we often say, “Words cannot express how I feel” and the knotted threads are pulled tighter. 

The great writers  of this world have and did experience the same kinds of loss, love, elation, and used metaphor in order to come closer to a true representation of it.  Mostly it was impossible, but in striving to find meaning in experience through metaphor, those tight knots untangled somewhat, or not: the journey tells us so much about the human experience, endurance, hope, bloody-minded stamina.  I think of Yeats who tried to unravel his love to Maud Gonne; Plath who tried to find meaning in her father’s death.  These writers return again and again to the same subjects trying in different ways to find sense, to come to a clear and rational understanding.  Sometimes we don’t know what we think or feel before we write it down, before we place it in the box of language.  There’s a reason “stanza” means “Room” in Italian.  We strive to place ideas in a room and walk into another. 

I read a great article in the New York Times today, which inspired me to sit down and write this.  It was about the semi-colon. (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/semicolons-a-love-story/) It turns out that there's a lot to say about it actually.  The real language Geek inside me read the article with absolute relish; she figuratively rubbed her hands together with delight.  (Note the semi-colon joining the two sentences together?  I couldn't resist trying her out.  It's only right that she be present while I discuss her.  She's not an Oxford comma; I wouldn't talk about her behind her back!)

The writer begins the article by quoting Kurt Vonnegut, who said:  "Do not use semi-colons.  They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.  All they do is show you've  been to college."  To  me this is Vonnegut defying convention, asserting that to deny rules is somehow to pare away pretension in the literary form.  In other words: leave out the semi-colons to show that you're more interested in substance over style.  It's understandable that the NY Times writer bought this completely, so eager was he to fit into the Vonnegut/Hemingway imaginary dinner party, come cook-out with lots of protein and definitely no vegetables.  To him, all other punctuation marks were acceptable for use, even the colon which is like a non-identical twin to the semi-colon.  It lives on the same key on the keyboard, next door to the ampersand and upstairs to the full-stop and question mark (which shares a room with the slash, thus making me imagine two college buddies: one questioning life and the other constantly drinking too much and having to use the conveniences on a regular basis.)

But, like a good writer should, he came to reject Vonnegut's inverted snobbery about the punctuation mark, finally finding its use incredibly liberating, facilitating expression rather than hindering it.  One comes to wonder if the thinking process changes when we understand the use of punctuation or if punctuation merely fits into thought... "What does it do?" a young David may have inquired.  "It can divide up items in a complex list, or it can be used in place of a full-stop when two sentences are related closely in meaning.  If you link them using a semi-colon, you're showing a relationship between sentences.  That's when things get interesting...."My eyes would sparkle; his would be dulled with a pitiable, "I wish I hadn't asked," look.  Ahh well.   

To me, it is a necessary tool in writing to create "rooms" in a long utterance, which in itself is a house.  Our thoughts- mine included-tend to be elastic, jumping quickly from one idea to the next; they can take the most strange of detours; they can visit many seemingly disparate door-ways en-route; finally, they can take you firmly to the point being made.  Instead of flummoxing a reader, the semi-colon allows a mile-stone to rest upon before continuing the journey to the end of the sentence.  Those mile-stones are markers; they make sure that we're less likely to lose our way and if we do, we don't have to return to the start, just the last mile-stone we remember passing.  

Of course, that's just my opinion.  We're all free to decide which side of the Vonnegut fence we rest on. 

A final thought: students often ask me if punctuation is really important.  Do they REALLY need to use apostrophes correctly?  Can't they just miss them out?  I don't reply.  Instead, I withdraw a handy pile of Poe's short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart" from a box marked, "For Emergencies."  I explain that punctuation in writing is like musical notation.  Imagine all notes were the same without differing values; imagine a score without a time-signature.  Why does a composer need such things at her/his disposal?  Music should be played as it was written to be played, but that does not mean that there isn't room for interpretation.  To me, Poe uses punctuation like a great composer: to create crescendo, diminuendo;  quiet, disquiet; climax, anti-climax; tension, denouement. Without it we would not gasp, our hearts would not race in the same way as we enter the mind of the mad-man as he slowly unravels. 


When someone can write with a real sense of control, I can feel it in my bones: I see with their eyes and can be utterly transported.  That means using all the tricks we can to pull the rabbit from the hat, whether we're seventeen and sitting an exam , or if we are a stalwart in the canon of American fiction.