Black Gate

Moving on from the em dash (—), my series on punctuation continues with a post guaranteed to leave you hanging.

The ellipsis, a.k.a. “those dots in a row,” are perhaps the most mysterious of the common forms of punctuation. The mystery begins in childhood, probably during a viewing of one of the Star Wars films, where a strange line of periods give the feeling of floating off into the story as the opening prologue crawl comes to an end. . . .

But it is not an end . . . because of those dots. . . . What do they do, anyway? How do I use them?

Well……….not like this……….

That was the first rule of ellipis (pl. ellipses) that I had to learn: how many of those damn dots are there supposed to be? To look at most Internet forums posts, where the ellipsis is more common than the word “the,” it would appear that some people have never learned the correct number of dots and instead lean on the period key and watch it repeat until they reach a level of satisfaction.

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This is the most complicated image ever presented on the Black Gate website.

A few days after I posted my article on the use of semicolons in fiction, I was at a writers’ group meeting and brought up the subject of the contentious punctuation mark. When I expressed my enjoyment of semicolons, one of the other writers present at the library table asked the most appropriate follow-up question:

“How do you feel about em dashes?”

Terrific query. Answer: I love ‘em. Many uses, wonderful informality, a real rhythm-maker. Great way to smash the cymbals on your drum set in the middle of a jazz riff. My major caveat about the em dash is that if overused, it draws enormous visual attention to itself that no reader can miss; the em dash is the most immediately obvious character on a page, and a slew of them is visible with a single glance. You know how annoying a long drum solo can get.

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No, the title of this post is not a typo.

I have recently spent some quality time pondering the most misunderstood of all punctuation marks: the semicolon. Specifically, what role should the semicolon play in fiction? If any?

If you cruise around Google a bit, you will find that most fiction writers come down hard on this strange Moreau of colon and comma. The post on this site is one example, and the writer quotes Kurt Vonnegut’s screed against the typographical mark: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

This shows that Mr. Vonnegut had very little faith in high school. You should know how to use a semicolon before you get to college, or else your English teachers have really been taking standing naps at the podium. (This colorful site does a nice rundown on usage.)

Okay, so I get the gist of it from the majority of fiction advisers: semicolon is sorta strange looking, works better in academic and nonfiction work, and writers can get the same grammatical effect by turning those independent clauses into two separate sentences. And there’s always the em dash (which could start up another debate.)

Except, right as I was reading over this advice, I immediately came across two books from major writers with the semicolon putting in a great amount of time — and doing amazing things.

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