It can't be accidental that the article has multiple paragraphs where they use an em dash where a semicolon would've also been appropriate.
It uses an em rule where an en rule would have been correct: em rules are not surrounded by spaces.
The melancholy decline of the semicolon
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Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#42Sentence length has gone down a lot, it feels like. So really, the semicolon has not been replaced by the dash, but by the period.
For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.
Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#43I'll save you a click, this is just faux-intellectual drivel.
Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#44I enjoy using semicolons when writing, a dash is not always appropriate. Bonus points if it makes me look like a pompous loner going against society. Reject modernity, embrace semicolons.
Reject modernity; embrace semicolons.
Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#45I find it amusing that programmers use semicolons more often then writers.
Nature finds a way to balance things...
Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#46Twitter has rescued the semicolon for me as a way to save a character since an em-dash requires an extra space.
While some publications do add space on either side of an em-dash—including, apparently, the submitted website—I was always taught not to. It certainly isn't required.
Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#47Semicolons aren't just for high literature: https://serprex.github.io/w/;
> Semicolons are hot
Dash seems a poor substitute. A dash is closer to a period. Semicolons work well for when just using multiple commas would become ambiguous. Shorter sentences also solve that, but sometimes you want a run on sentence, sometimes you want to splice more context in at this very point. & sometimes you just want to drop a conjunction
Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#48Meh. Grammar, in general, is on a steep suckiness trend. For example, when was the last time you saw someone on the web actually use the correct past tense of "lead (verb, transitive)"?
What is the correct past tense of lead? I thought it was “led”, but I can’t remember having ever read any other form?
What often irks me, as a non-native speaker, is the wrong subjunctive (if that’s what it’s called). People say and write all the time “I wish you were there”, when they mean “I wish you had been there”. At least I’m pretty sure that’s how it’s supposed to be…
Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#49Sentence length has gone down a lot, it feels like. So really, the semicolon has not been replaced by the dash, but by the period.
For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.
And the sad thing is, they don’t even know what the passive voice is! See G. K. Pullum, Fear and Loathing of the English Passive [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html]. Their unintentional hypocrisy is quite something, e.g.:
> … it makes little difference if you decide to look at prose written by the advisers on usage themselves. Consider the beginning of E. B. White's introduction to his revision of The Elements of Style (Strunk & White 2000). I underline the head verbs of the passive VPs … Six instances of transitive verbs appear here: took, called, required, called, known, and printed. Five of them are in the passive. That's over 83 percent.
Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon
#50If you’re a good enough writer to know how to property use a semicolon, you’re a good enough writer to not need to use one.
> to not need to use one Why should one avoid using it.
One should decide if one is using it because it’s the best way to communicate with one’s audience or if one is proud that one knows how to use a semicolon properly.