Our best punctuation mark is dying out; people need to learn how to use it

Forget black rhinos and the Amazon rainforest: there’s something arguably just as precious joining the endangered species list, only this time, it’s a grammatical rather than biological extinction event on the horizon. I’m talking about the poor, misunderstood semicolon.

Yes, that most elegant of punctuation marks – sitting elusively somewhere between an en-dash and a colon – is officially under threat. Its usage in English books has been slashed almost in half in the last 25 years, according to new research by language-learning software Babbel and reported by The Guardian. It appears once in every 390 words today, compared with every 205 in 2000.

In a separate piece of research commissioned off the back of these stark findings, Lisa McLendon, author of The Perfect English Grammar Workbook, found that more than half of British students didn’t know or understand how to use a semicolon. In a survey sent to the London Student Network’s 500,000 members, 67 per cent of respondents admitted to never or rarely using one, while a mere 11 per cent claimed to be frequent users. If anything, I’d wager that the latter, self-reported percentage is overly generous – perhaps massaged by students who were willing it, rather than believing it, to be true.

Part of the problem has always been, as identified by this latest research, the sheer number of people who simply don’t know what to do with this confounding piece of punctuation. Fear not, I’m not here to chide the stupidity of “illiterate Britain” and start bashing those who don’t know their “there” from their “they’re” with my specially made grammar-snob paddle. I will, however, firmly point the finger at an English school syllabus that, for a long time, framed teaching children about the founding rules and principles of their native language as a fun, optional extra.

I’m as much a victim of this as anyone, having been educated in the Nineties and Noughties. I turned up at university with very little idea of what semicolons were for – a fact that in no way stopped me from shoehorning them in wherever I thought they might add an extra sprinkle of academic pizzazz. Consequently, most of my essays were returned covered with red circles highlighting all the incorrect usages (which constituted pretty much all of them).

The most common misuse – the one I fell prey to all those years ago – is putting a semicolon in place of a comma. It’s not merely a pause; it’s a tool to separate two independent clauses that are somehow linked. If in doubt, you should be able to take a semicolon away and replace it with a full stop to make two coherent sentences. If you can’t, it’s not the right punctuation for the situation. Here endeth the grammar lesson.

Even for those who do feel confident deploying it correctly, the semicolon seems to have become increasingly unfashionable over the last century. Various respected writers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein and Cormac McCarthy, have publicly denounced my favourite punctuation mark as “showy”, “unnecessary”, “idiocy”, and a way of showing people “you’ve been to college” (this last bit of absolute savagery thrown by Vonnegut in 2005). All of this has only added to the unfair misrepresentation of the semicolon as somehow “pretentious” – the punctuation equivalent of having “opinions” about wine lists and insisting on not owning a TV as a badge of moral superiority.

Its decline surely has even more to do with the rise of the smartphone and, subsequently, emojis. Back in the first wave of mobiles and texting, messages were short and to the point – at 10p a go, you better believe we were fastidious when it came to maximising word count – which resulted in a staccato, telegram-like style of communication. No one had enough space to be joining clauses together, for goodness’ sake, and yet there was still an unexpected place for the semicolon to thrive in this brave new world.

Where character counts were constrained, emoticons helped to convey meaning. Punctuation marks could be combined to create rudimentary expressions, such as a colon and a closing parenthesis to indicate a smiley face (“no worries!!!”) or a colon and an “o” to represent a surprised face (“definitely some worries!!!”). Swap in a semicolon, and you had yourself a winky face, a crucial component of Noughties flirting via text. It may not have been the function originally envisaged by Italian scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius the Elder – whose work contains the first recorded use of a semicolon in 1494 – but at least our girl seemed to have got her mojo back.

The development of emojis put paid to that. Actual faces conveying a much broader spectrum of emotional states swept in and made their forerunners obsolete. At the same time, they seemed to replace punctuation in messages altogether. Though character counts no longer mattered in a world of unlimited texts and free-to-use WhatsApps, even full stops became passé. Why use a boring dot to end a sentence when you could shrug, scream, or roll your eyes?

Going forward, I can only see a world in which our precious semicolon gets even further ostracised. After all, almost one in five (18.5 per cent) of 13- to 18-year-olds are already using generative AI to write stories, according to research by the National Literacy Trust. AI regurgitates ideas and style based on the material it’s been fed – so if writing by humans has fewer semicolons, it stands to reason that writing by AI will follow suit. It feels like a vicious cycle: people will read them less and therefore use them less, and so on and so on, until the semicolon inevitably becomes as rare a sighting in the wild as the Sumatran orangutan.

On one level, I understand. The semicolon is not essential. Unlike the workaday comma or full stop, it’s fundamentally replaceable – just throw in a dash instead and see how the world goes on turning. But why would you want to replace such a chic little grammatical tool, one that allows us to seamlessly connect ideas without having to forcibly break them up or slow down the pace of a paragraph? When used thoughtfully, sparingly, it lends a timeless touch of class to any piece of prose. The semicolon’s appeal lies in its very lack of necessity; some of the most beautiful things in life aren’t, strictly speaking, “necessary”.

Here’s a thought: how about we embrace and relearn how to use this beguiling, grammatical gift, rather than wasting precious characters needlessly trying to write it out of existence. Period.