Life is no way to treat an animal. - KV
April 12th, 2008
Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut’s death.
One thing I learned from his book, A Man Without Country, which I finished reading just days before his passing, is what he said about semicolons. Never use them. They are useless and the only people who use them (to connect two sentences, I assume) are pretentious and simply want to show off the fact that they know how to use a semicolon. Good to know. I haven’t used a semicolon in my writing since. Any writing I care about, anyway. I would like you to never use a semicolon ever again, either. I’m not sure that using a semicolon makes you pretentious or if using a semicolon is merely a symptom of pretense already in progress, but that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.