ii.5

THE SEMICOLON

BY AARON CROSBY

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my education recently, and I think every experience I’ve ever had was just an iteration of high school English, and if I had to be even more specific and pick one single lesson, one shining gem of dogmatism that so perfectly encapsulates every scrap of information I’ve ever forcibly shoved into my brain it would be the day that How To Use a Semicolon wafted through hormone laden clouds to lodge between my ears, for as a good student I began to incorporate it into my writing; closely related phrases were juxtaposed without the thought-wall that is the period intervening; in fact, I liked to use semicolons most with transitions and adverbs, although sometimes I liked to use it for really long lists of nouns, verbs or adjectives; or, more commonly, for ones containing lots of commas which would be confusing without my new friend, the semicolon; however, the faster I began to hand in papers containing semicolons, the faster they came back covered in red circles with admonitions like “use a period” scrawled in the margins, and as I grew increasingly frustrated, I began to realize that sometimes we are taught things so that we may be taught we are wrong, and that even though to one teacher it may be grammatically correct to begin a sentence with a conjunction and to use a semicolon in your writing, there’s some expert, somewhere who thinks it is an affront to the English language, and that sometimes, when you decide to flex your muscles and are fed up with authority’s opinion of absolute right and absolute wrong, it is necessary to break all sorts of other people’s rules in the course of writing a 300 word essay consisting of a single sentence.