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.

Oh, and I’m pretty proud of my 9/10!

I love a semicolon and I HATE comma splicing. (10/10).

A comma splice has no place, ever. It’s always wrong.

I agree. It's just incorrect. I'm an English teacher and it's my biggest bug-bear in my students' writing. The problem is that so many people seem to think it's acceptable these days.

I’m a hyphen fan as well.

I thought they were all hyphens and didn’t realise they had different names, or in fact lengths!

I’ve also learnt a couple of days ago that there’s such a thing as an Oxford Comma.

Don’t confuse me further, I’ve just read about em and en dashes, and now you’re saying there’s spaced en-dashes (and why aren’t they called n- and m- dashes?)

Forgot to say, I got 5/10 so am obviously the dunce of the group, and also the product of 70/80 education (although I did get an English a-level).

10/10, and my schooling was '70s & '80s.

I am a fan of both the semi-colon and Oxford comma.

This week's Word of Mouth was about punctuation. Although I am seeing Michael Rosen in a new light after he described his use of exclamation marks.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002c3cb

I think it depends on how much distance you would like between the clauses. Do you want to keep one clause somewhat separate? Use brackets. Would you like to 'balance' two connected sentences? Use a semi-colon. Do you want it all to flow smoothly in an informal manner? Use dashes.

The above is not based on any grammar rules, just my preference.

Oh, come on. There are usually far too few sodding commas on these threads.

I would call them two sentences. (I have had a debate with myself as to whether or not 'it took a long time' constitutes a sentence.) I'm going back to sleep now.

I'm talking about in the wild (at work, for example).

I've always used 'How does it feel being read out loud?' as my acceptable standard for writing; those commas leave the reader lost in space and gasping for breath.

I got 8 and disagreed with one. It seemed a weird place to use one.

Amazingly 10/10 here, commas and semi-colons are not interchangeable. I hate comma splices 😡

They are called n and m dashes; they're only written as they are to avoid misunderstandings. i.e. so that the reader knows the n and the m aren't initials for something else.
And "spaced" just means there's a space before and after the dash. You can see em-dashes used in older 20th-century books with no space between the dash and the words on either side.

Yes - and I believe ChatGPT does that too (based upon my students' work when they try to pass off an AI essay as their own! 🙄)