eBook - ePub

SEMICOLON EB

Name: SEMICOLON EB
ISBN: 9780008291587

Cecelia Watson,

English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

SEMICOLON EB

Cecelia Watson,

About this book

'Fascinating… I loved this book; I really did' David Crystal, Spectator

A biography of a much misunderstood punctuation mark and a call to arms in favour of clear expression and against stifling grammar rules.

Cecelia Watson used to be obsessive about grammar rules. But then she began teaching. And that was when she realized that strict rules aren't always the best way of teaching people how to make words say what they want them to; that they are even, sometimes, best ignored.

One punctuation mark encapsulates this thorny issue more clearly than any other. The semicolon. Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, it is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?

In this warm, funny, enlightening and thoroughly original book, Cecelia Watson takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the surprising history of the semicolon and explores the remarkable power it can wield, if only we would stop being afraid of it.

Forget the rules; you're in charge. It's time to make language do what you want it to.

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Yes, you can access SEMICOLON EB by Cecelia Watson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Historical Theory & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.