Semicolons Can Guide the Reader’s Eye and Ear through a Complex Series
A quick note and some examples
Even writers who feel some mistrust of the semicolon as a connector (between independent clauses) will, I hope, agree that it’s nearly indispensable as a divider.
Semicolons are used to separate the items in a long or complex series, especially when at least one of the items contains commas or other punctuation. Used this way, semicolons provide visual cues that help guide the reader’s eye through a complicated patch of text.
For example, without its semicolons, even this relatively straightforward list could be visually confusing:
The early Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe’s works include The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, published in 1789, when Radcliffe was 25; The Romance of the Forest (1791); The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); The Italian (1797); and Gaston de Blondeville, which was not published until after her death in 1823.
The semicolon also serves as a sort of musical notation, signaling where a breath or tiny rest should occur. When the semicolon was invented in 15th-century Italy, it was specifically intended to indicate a pause—longer than that of a comma but shorter than that of a colon.
Those tiny rests help the reader navigate the auditory experience of a text (even when reading silently).
For a more musical example, here’s Dustin Illingworth writing in the Paris Review about what makes the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai “difficult to mistake for anyone else”:
There are the sudden, demonic accelerations; the extraordinary leaps in intensity; the gorgeous derangements of consciousness; the muddy villages of Mitteleuropa; the abyssal laughter; the pervasive sense of a choleric god waiting patiently just offstage.
And here’s literary critic Helen Vendler describing a solar eclipse she and the poet Seamus Heaney watched from Tintern Abbey:
I had of course read descriptions of the phenomena of a total eclipse, but no words could equal the total-body/total landscape effect; the ceasing of bird song; the inexorability of the dimming to a crescent and then to a corona; the total silence; the gradual salience of the stars; the iciness of the silhouette of the towers; the looming terror of the steely eclipse of all of nature.
In addition, the complex series, properly semicoloned, has obvious advantages if you’re a writer who favors long sentences. Here’s a single sentence from Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Annie John, in which the narrator catalogs the contents of her mother’s trunk in a series of independent clauses:
There were some of my diapers, with their handkerchief hemstitch that she had also done herself; there was a pair of white wool booties with matching jacket and hat; there was a blanket in white wool and a blanket in white flannel cotton; there was a plain white linen hat with lace trimming; there was my christening outfit; there were two of my baby bottles: one in the shape of a normal baby bottle, and the other shaped like a boat, with a nipple on either end; there was a thermos in which my mother had kept a tea that was supposed to have a soothing effect on me; there was the dress I wore on my first birthday: a yellow cotton with green smocking on the front; there was the dress I wore on my second birthday: pink cotton with green smocking on the front; there was also a photograph of me on my second birthday wearing my pink dress and my first pair of earrings, a chain around my neck, and a pair of bracelets, all specially made of gold from British Guiana; there was the first pair of shoes I grew out of after I knew how to walk; there was the dress I wore when I first went to school, and the first notebook in which I wrote; there were the sheets for my crib and the sheets for my first bed; there was my first straw hat, my first straw basket—decorated with flowers—my grandmother had sent me from Dominica; there were my report cards, my certificates of merit from school, and my certificates of merit from Sunday school.
That sentence takes up more than a page of the novel, but the reader follows along easily. In fact, the length and pacing of this list are doing important work for the narrative. As the series progresses, each additional clause holds the reader’s attention a little longer on the trunk, which becomes an important symbol in the story.
Have you read any great sentences that use semicolons in a complex series? Good examples are always welcome: put them in the comments.