"Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair," said The Spectator, for the semicolon, that "most elegant, elusive of punctuation marks", is all but dead. Use of the semicolon (in lists, or to join ...

There is a punctuation mark that Emily Dickinson used obsessively, that Mary Shelley deployed with abandon, that David Foster Wallace built an entire prose architecture around, and that James Baldwin ...

Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on Jan. 2, 2026. Click here for that audio. The semicolon has been described as a “graceful pause” in writing. But this graceful punctuation mark is being ...

I still think about the feedback I got on one of my first history essays in high school: “good writing, but you rely too much ...

Suspicious that an awkward email or stilted college essay may have been written by artificial intelligence? Some people think there’s a surefire way to tell — the em dash. Writers, journalists and ...

LONDON — Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a ...

The semicolon has been described as a “graceful pause” in writing. But this graceful punctuation mark is being forgotten. Mark Lasswell wrote a recent piece on the semicolon and why it’s fading away ...