Colons and semicolons are the indie rock of punctuation marks. They’re not mainstream-popular like the period. They aren’t obvious and eager-to-please like the exclamation mark. They’re not everywhere ...

It begins with a squinting of the eyes. Hm. A semicolon. You approach it with caution. Ok, I can do this. One dot, plus a comma. There. No, wait. That doesn’t look quite right. The questions begin: ...

Love or detest it, the semicolon is the most divisive punctuation mark of the modern era. Should we even care? "His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free." From the ...

Semicolons are often used to join parts of a sentence together to establish variety and link related ideas. Unlike a colon, which separates an independent clause from descriptive information, a ...

The period (full stop) is perhaps the only punctuation mark that learners and those versed in the English language use correctly. On the other hand, the most misused punctuation marks by both learner ...

Either everyone in the Fray went to the same school, or else those pesky English professors have a lot to answer for—a surprising number of posters say their teacher told them not to use the ...

I've talked about colons more than once in this column, but my focus is usually limited in scope. I zoom in on the little questions, like how many spaces to put after a colon and whether it should be ...

So a recent memo I wrote was reviewed and in the flurry of red ink, this sentence was corrected by my manager (some words have been changed):<BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip ...

“The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops ...

Cecelia Watson, author of “Semicolon: The Past, Present and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.” Historian and philosopher of science. Faculty member in Bard College’s Language and Thinking program.