Why the semicolon is stupid
I rarely take a stand on anything prescriptive in academic or professional communications. Even working with clients, I ask more questions than I provide answers. But this is the exception. I encounter two kinds of people when it comes to semicolons: those who overuse the mark and those who are terrified of it. Both groups would benefit from the same advice: stop using semicolons to link sentences.
The semicolon’s history is telling. It emerged from the Venetian printing presses of the late 1400s, invented by the printer Aldo Manuzio to help readers navigate the long, complex sentences of humanist texts. It wasn’t created by writers. It was a tool of typography, designed to impose structure on dense prose. From its inception, the semicolon signaled one thing: your sentence is too complicated. Over a century later, Ben Jonson described it as marking “somewhat a longer breath” than a comma, a guide for people who read aloud. That original function—dictating rhythm and breathing—has nothing to do with how we read today. We read silently, quickly, and for information, not performance.
Modern professional writing values clarity above all. The plain language movement, which has become the standard in government and legal fields, respects the reader’s time and cognitive energy by prioritizing short sentences and explicit connections. The semicolon, by its nature, works against this. It encourages long, compound sentences and forces readers to infer the relationship between clauses.
Grammar textbooks say the semicolon has two jobs. The first is to connect two “closely related” independent clauses. The problem is that what counts as “closely related” is entirely subjective. This ambiguity is a liability where precision matters. The writer forces the reader to pause and deduce a connection that should have been stated outright. Why make reading harder?
The second function, to act as a “super-comma” in complex lists (e.g., “Paris, France; London, England; and Rome, Italy”), is more defensible. It prevents confusion by marking clear boundaries. Even so, a bulleted list is almost always a better solution, as it’s easier to scan and understand.
Defenders often argue the semicolon adds sophistication. It doesn’t. It adds friction. The mark makes your writing look like you’re trying to appear sophisticated. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” When a reader encounters a semicolon, their attention shifts from your content to your punctuation, a clear rhetorical failure. Others claim it clarifies the relationship between ideas, but this is backwards. If the connection is clear, you don’t need a semicolon. If it isn’t, a semicolon won’t fix it. The objection that avoiding them leads to “short, choppy sentences” also misses the point. Short sentences are clear. Prose rhythm comes from varying sentence length strategically, not from avoiding periods.
When you reach for a semicolon, you are usually trying to patch a sentence that should have been rewritten. The mark is a diagnostic tool that signals your sentence is too long or that you’re trying to link ideas that are only weakly related. This, combined with the fact that misuse is rampant, makes the semicolon a significant liability. The mark you thought made you look smart often becomes evidence that you don’t understand grammar.
Of course, experienced creative writers are free to use semicolons all they want. They’re playing a different game with different rules, often for stylistic effect. For the rest of us, the alternatives are better: use a period, a conjunction like ‘and’ or ‘so,’ or a transition word like ‘Therefore.’ These tools make connections explicit.
The semicolon had a good run. Five centuries is impressive for a piece of typography. But it was born from Renaissance printing presses to solve Renaissance problems. We don’t read like Renaissance scholars, we don’t write like Renaissance humanists, and we shouldn’t punctuate like Venetian printers. The period works just fine.