It is a piece of punctuation that has divided writers and authors for centuries. Novelists including Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen have not shied away from using them, but that has not stopped ...

The most frequent use of the semi-colon is between two complete sentences. It can be substituted for a comma plus a conjunction. Ex: Tom ate breakfast with his family, and then he left for his trip.

“The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops ...

Cecelia Watson, author of “Semicolon: The Past, Present and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.” Historian and philosopher of science. Faculty member in Bard College’s Language and Thinking program.

Writers and editors don’t always agree; really, they don’t. There was a time, years ago, when I was an editor at the now defunct Times-Union that I made some changes — necessary, I’m sure — to a story ...

Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a “Seinfeld ...

Do you know how to use a semicolon correctly? Even if you think you do, are you sure? That odd cross between a colon and a comma may be the most frequently misused and misunderstood punctuation mark ...