Death of the Semicolon; Or, Why Grammar Pedants Deserve to be Locked in the Stationery Cupboard

By Someone Who’s Had Enough of the Punctuation Police.

Once upon a time, in a cold squeaky classroom smelling faintly of boiled cabbage and broken dreams, my old bespectacled English teacher stood beneath a peeling poster of Shakespeare and uttered the immortal words: “The semicolon is used to connect closely related independent clauses.”