It is hard not to sympathise with Irvine Welsh, who said that anyone who got so worked up about a semicolon 'should get a f***ing life or a proper job'. Yet Watson’s years thinking about it have done the world a favour. The semicolon is not a small thing. It leads straight to our insecurities about education and class ... Because she spent so long researching and writing, Watson has been able to make her book wondrously short. She has hunted down the very finest examples of semicolons in use, in order to prove how poorly rules serve us ... The aim of Semicolon is admirable; its effect on me has been counterproductive. Everything I read I now scan for any sign of this little punctuation mark. Far from helping me connect to meaning, my eyes are so peeled for a sighting of a semicolon I’m barely taking in any meaning at all.
Watson...has gotten the historical background from Malcolm Parkes’s unbelievably learned Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West. Instead of doing a historical survey, though, she skips from Manutius to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians in order to get rules-based pedantry in her sights early on. In tone, her book is closer to Lynne Truss’s jokey Eats, Shoots & Leaves than it is to, say, David Crystal’s levelheaded Making a Point ... But her chattiness is much less annoying than Truss’s, and her argument runs in a different direction.
...Watson traces the warring (and gendered) camps of prose style — a fixation on clarity and directness versus a curled sensibility, one interested in the fertile territories of ambiguity. Watson covers impressive ground in this short book, skittering back and forth like a sandpiper at the shores of language’s Great Debates. There are fascinating forays into how grammarians 'created a market for their rules,' the strange history of diagramming sentences and the racial politics of so-called standard English. Watson is sharpest when acting a bit like a semicolon herself, perceiving subtle connections and burrowing into an argument. Whatever her subject, her targets are always pedants, those acolytes of 'actually,' all those who profess to love language but seek only to control it ... Watson opposes conventions only as they exist to spare us from thinking. Don’t just learn the rules, her clever, curious book prompts us; learn to ask, whose rules (and to admire that semicolon while you’re at it).
Given her enigmatic, esoteric subject, historian Watson has crafted an impeccably readable meditation on the semicolon ... Unlike a manual of style...this book’s examples portion isn’t long. Watson instead enforces a thesis stating that devoted adhesion to the rules of Standard Written English is a privilege afforded to very few. She reminds readers that there is an entire world of storytelling and communication that has nothing to do with how a sentence is spliced. It puts punctuation in perspective, which will be of particular significance to grammar sticklers, the readers most likely to pull this one from the shelf.
According to Cecelia Watson, semicolons aren’t just punctuation marks. They’re also 'a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated.' That may seem a heavy burden for one little grammatical tool to shoulder. But in Watson’s witty, wily account, it doesn’t feel like an overstatement ... For those who enjoy spending their time in these grammatical weeds as much as I do, Watson raises plenty of diverting style-related questions ... Semicolon left me hankering for what Watson might have to say about the punctuation circus of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or the energizing use of ellipses in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. In the meantime, there’s plenty to savor in this delectable nugget of a book.
A brisk study ... [an] informed and witty book ... Fittingly but also a bit frustratingly, the author structures her book in a semicolon-ish way; the chapters are loosely related but not always closely connected ... If the author isn't padding, she sometimes seems determined to stretch the scope of the book beyond its stated subject. Yet from chapter to chapter, she brings a gadfly’s spirit to the proceedings, thoughtfully lobbying for written English that resists restrictions ... The value of the semicolon may be no clearer by the end. But then, it’s a form of punctuation defined by ambiguity. Sprightly and scholarly, this will appeal to grammar geeks who are patient with Watson’s free-range sensibility.
Watson, a historian and philosopher of science and a teacher of writing and the humanities—in other words, a Renaissance woman—gives us a deceptively playful-looking book that turns out to be a scholarly treatise on a sophisticated device that has contributed eloquence and mystery to Western civilization ... Watson is especially thought-provoking on the topic of semicolons and the law, where ambiguity can lead to trouble.
The book’s brief history of the semicolon is more fun than it sounds ... Almost everybody who cares about this subject, even the vanishingly small number of grammar snobs left in the world, understand that writers who know what they’re doing can bend and break the rules to good effect. Do we need to be told one more time that all those 'prescriptivist' grammarians of the 18th and 19th centuries failed to grasp the always-evolving nature of language? Do we need one more book alerting us, as Ms. Watson does, to the fact that an insistence on rule-following can exclude people of less privileged backgrounds? ... Like most grammarians in our latitudinarian age, Ms. Watson enjoys her status as an elite user of language but can’t bring herself to pronounce judgment of any kind, except to dismiss those who do ... Ms. Watson has shown us she’s been to college, but for what reason?
In this impressive debut, Watson, a historian and philosopher of science, takes readers through a lively and varied 'biography' of the semicolon ... Watson argues...with growing passion as the book progresses ... Watson lands an especially strong point with her takedown of the inflexibility and 'rule mongering of the David Foster Wallace types' ... The stress on compassionate punctuation lifts this work from an entertaining romp to a volume worth serious consideration.
Semicolon is a charming book. Cecelia Watson takes on 'the most feared punctuation mark on earth' ... with a charm and enthusiasm that grammarians like Lynn Truss and Mary Norris reserve for the comma ... Watson, however, is less a grammarian than a historian of grammar, and Semicolon is less a writing guide than an exploration of a punctuational oddity’s evolution. Watson’s history is unexpectedly engaging ... She suggests that 'we can peel away the justification that ‘rules are really in language’ and free ourselves to ask instead, ‘What good rules might be, even if they aren’t strictly necessary or sufficient?' It’s an argument for deep knowledge and style awareness, moving beyond strictures to something educated, intuitive, and graceful.
...[a] lively, scattershot book ... [Watson] is great fun to read and pleasingly opinionated, with a tendency to wander ... Watson’s academic training is broad-based, encompassing the history of science, philosophy, and the humanities, so it’s not surprising that her book ranges widely. Her best chapter closely examines passages by five wildly different writers...masterfully demonstrate the varied ways individual artists use semicolons to speed up a sentence, slow it down, create energy, suggest mysteries. Watson’s joyful love of language comes through in her marvelous appreciations ... Rambling and idiosyncratic, Semicolon is nonetheless essential reading for anyone who cares about language and its uses.
For Watson, [writing] has everything to do, again, with the fluidity of language, which is — or must be, if it is to remain flexible and relevant — constantly evolving. It is addressing this that Semicolon comes to life. The history is interesting, if arcane in places, tracing disputes between linguists, the rise of sentence diagramming, even a series of legal challenges ... Watson, however, finds her sharpest voice in literary analysis ... What makes this all so vivid is her willingness to engage ... , if Semicolon has anything to tell us, it is that language is about more than information; it is about touch and receptivity. 'The semicolon', Watson wants us to remember, 'is that tantalizing veil shimmering between the two halves of the sentence, showing us just enough to let us dream.'
