The disuse seems a worse evil
Paul Collins is my favorite skeptic of the decline narrative, and he's in good form in this Slate article about the decline of the semicolon:
One of my favorite lesson plans for University Writing is to have the students diagnose their "compulsive sentences": what's the sentence structure that you over-use because you've gotten good results from it in the past? Everyone has to find an example of the structure which works well in a paper and an example of where it works less well. They also have to explain why they use it--not in some Freudian way, but just in a 'this is how my syntax reflects my thinking' kind of way.
The lesson always gets wonderful, rich results at all levels of sentence complexity. We've discussed the over-use of "in effect," "indeed," and "thus" as transition words which fake the work of actually explaining the connection between ideas. "Furthermore" is another usual suspect. One student noticed that she often began sentences in her conclusions with the phrase, "it is impossible to say" because she wasn't sure what types of statements actually belonged in conclusions. I asked another student why he joined unconnected clauses with semicolons in every paragraph. He said he had heard the semicolon was the way to look smart.
I like to tell them about my compulsive sentence from high school. My friend Paige and I were enamored of the 'clause; rather, clause' structure and tried to fit into all the papers we wrote. When we had to co-author a policy paper for Model UN, we labored over where to best set our jewel. In an inspired moment, we changed the font size for that single sentence to 12.5.
"I don't even know why we did that," I say, "because the sentence was so awesome that they would have noticed it anyway."
Yet in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe declared himself "mortified" by printers once again using too many semicolons. Poe may have the distinction of being the last writer to complain of the semicolon's popularity. By 1865, grammarian Justin Brenan could boast of "The rejection of the eternal semicolons of our ancestors. ... The semicolon has been gradually disappearing, not only from newspapers, but from books—insomuch that I believe instances could now be produced, of entire pages without a single semicolon."
1865? But surely that's a century off: Isn't modern life to blame?
One of my favorite lesson plans for University Writing is to have the students diagnose their "compulsive sentences": what's the sentence structure that you over-use because you've gotten good results from it in the past? Everyone has to find an example of the structure which works well in a paper and an example of where it works less well. They also have to explain why they use it--not in some Freudian way, but just in a 'this is how my syntax reflects my thinking' kind of way.
The lesson always gets wonderful, rich results at all levels of sentence complexity. We've discussed the over-use of "in effect," "indeed," and "thus" as transition words which fake the work of actually explaining the connection between ideas. "Furthermore" is another usual suspect. One student noticed that she often began sentences in her conclusions with the phrase, "it is impossible to say" because she wasn't sure what types of statements actually belonged in conclusions. I asked another student why he joined unconnected clauses with semicolons in every paragraph. He said he had heard the semicolon was the way to look smart.
I like to tell them about my compulsive sentence from high school. My friend Paige and I were enamored of the 'clause; rather, clause' structure and tried to fit into all the papers we wrote. When we had to co-author a policy paper for Model UN, we labored over where to best set our jewel. In an inspired moment, we changed the font size for that single sentence to 12.5.
"I don't even know why we did that," I say, "because the sentence was so awesome that they would have noticed it anyway."
Labels: criticism, language, reading, typography, writing
Meg on Mon Jun 23, 09:18:00 PM: Ben on Tue Jun 24, 04:31:00 PM:
Anonymous on Tue Jun 24, 08:56:00 PM: Tove on Wed Jul 16, 06:39:00 PM: