The semicolon is dead;long live the comma splice.

[cakeorwine]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/18/marked-decline-semicolon-use-english-books-study-suggests

Apparently fewer people are using semicolons nowadays, they prefer using commas in their sentences.

The comma splice is really annoying. Either use a full stop or a semicolon but don't use a comma when you don't need to.

9/10. I like a semi colon and a comma splice; both have their place.

To me statements spliced by a comma read like a train of thought with pauses...
That's what em-dashes are for. Alas, the ignorance of hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes is so widespread that they're impossible to find in a lot of virtual keyboards.

As long as people, roughly, understand what I am getting at, that will do me just fine,

@Jamclag snap.
I think it was a 70/80s thing.

All I can remember being taught is what a noun is, what a verb is, what an adjective is, & that punctuation marks usually go inside the speech marks (unless the punctuation belongs to the rest of the sentence outside the quote.)

It wasn't until my first child had started school & came home with a SPaG explanation poster/handout then I realised how much I hadn't been taught!

It's really shocking!

10/10. I am an editor by trade though! Love a semicolon!

This does not come as a surprise to me.

10/10 for me. My college students are inveterate comma-splicers and it drives me potty.

Huh. I thought em-dashes for pauses were a modern affectation - ironically, I thought it was happening because no one knows how to use semicolons.

(Yes that is a hyphen. My keyboard doesn't have a em-dash)

I tend to use em-dashes - if I'm using them at all - to interrupt myself. So not quite a train of thought, which, unlike an interruption, can involve multiple statements.

Emily Dickinson is spinning in her grave like a propeller blade right now.

I have just learnt what an en dash is.

I thought it was a hyphen.

10/10 here. Although one of the questions was dubious; using semicolons in lists is a valid choice.

i don’t know why more folk don’t use semicolons. I love them. In their place.

In the UK we use spaced en dashes for parenthetical clauses or to signal an interruption in a sentence. Em dashes are generally used in US English.

My daughter says I’m the only person she knows who uses semi-colons in text and WhatsApp messages.

My kids say the same to me!

An appalling 7/10 here.

Not happy with myself.

omg. When I was taught colons and semi-colons (the only English grammar I was actually specifically taught) we were told that a colon replaced a full stop while a semi-colon replaced a comma.

The king is dead: long live the king.
The king is dead; but there's a new one.

I know this hasn't been taught since at least the early nineties, and I'd made my peace with that; but I'm steadfastly resisting the idea of separating two full sentences with a comma.

oh, is that true? I thought it was just me who keeps getting annoyed with Word and really needs to change the AutoFormat options...

@merryhouse your teacher was just wrong. (I'm older than you BTW).

10/10. And they will prise my semi-colons from my cold, dead hands.

I have failed the semi-colon test (pretend Stephen He is shouting) but surely as the English language changes so can our use of the semi-colon. I may be on board for a petition in aid of the Oxford comma.

8/10, despite an 80s education. I am guilty of littering sentences with commas and often just end up annoyed with the lot of them and going back and deleting them all. Semicolons are for coding 😂

10 out of 10

Love a semicolon!

10/10 I'm pleased to say.

Semicolons are one of the most important pieces of punctuation to me, both as a writer and for general communication. I genuinely can’t imagine writing without them; it would be a syntactic bloodbath!