I think you were right... I find the later option more appealing. Perhaps the cadence is better on the first, but it doesn't seem important enough of a plot point to necessitate cadence that seems more poetic than updating audience on status of character's condition.
I think you're right, Dan. I might save this semi-colon technique for a description/action that is a bit more intense, to warrant that more poetic feel.
Your examples are helpful and your way of explaining your choices and preferences, even more so. We have to find a way of alerting more aspiring readers to your existence! Have you considered a newsletter or website? What about creating some sort of giveaway, such as a tool for assessing some facet of our writing.
I'm glad you're finding the channel helpful, Bonnie. It means a lot that you feel the desire to share word of it. Personally, I'm not all that literate in the realms of social media, so I'm sure there are a few extra things I could be doing haha. I've been quite busy lately editing my debut novel, an epic fantasy titled, "Reflections of the Same", so I just haven't had the time. I'm sure I'll get around to an author website at some point, as well as a newsletter. But first I need a book! lol
@@coreyhuffman7607 Good point. I’m also in the process of editing and revising my first novel after publishing a few non-fiction books. Have a feeling you’re a fellow Canadian … :)
I always loved semicolons used this way. I think a way to describe it in generalized terms might be something like this? [Subject] [Verb] (Adv) [Object/Modifier] [; / ,] [Subject] [, / : / --] (Adv) [Object/Modifier] "Some think it's a curse and others think it's a blessing." ---- "Some think it's a curse; others, a blessing." ---- "Some think it's a curse, others: a blessing." ---- "Some think it's a curse, others -- a blessing." "The winters were so freezing and the summers were so scorching." ---- "The winters were so freezing; the summers, so scorching." ---- "The winters were so freezing, the summers: so scorching." ---- "The winters were so freezing, the summers -- so scorching." I tend to prefer the em dash or colon when using the comma (instead of the semicolon). Doing so avoids repeating the comma it in the second clause and helps prevent it from looking like a splice with the omission of the verb. On top of thinking of semicolons as something with a stronger cadence/closing than a comma but softer than a period, they can be thought of as "super commas" in a more generalized sense than lists (ex: "Houston, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Boston, MA"). I see them as clarifying the function of commas in between items/clauses connected by semicolons.
Since making this video, I myself may have shifted my preference to em dashes as well (in many cases, at least; semicolons are still an incredibly versatile punctuation). I've seen writers use semicolons in so many different ways.
@@coreyhuffman7607 Do you have a Discord if I may ask? I want a sentence-crafting bud! Most writers I encounter on there don't seem to care so much about this stuff and just focus on world-building and characters.
@@coreyhuffman7607 From a pure reader standpoint (although I also want to learn how to write more in accordance to my reading preferences), I always enjoyed authors who used a wide variety of punctuation -- periods, commas, semicolons, colons, parentheticals, em dashes, possibly even brackets for the likes of editorial comments and footnotes -- and varied simple/compound/complex sentence structures. I'm not always a fan of prose that only uses periods and commas unless it's quite simple in its subject matter (not drawing connections between many interrelated ideas). The way I perceive it is that commas already serve so many overloaded functions (using programmer-style terminology): to separate subordinate/dependent clauses from main/independent ones, to separate items in a list, to explicitly distinguish between coordinate adjectives and cumulative/compound adjectives, to further separate dialogue from narration, as an alternative to the colon when beginning a list, etc. Especially when such a writing style makes liberal use of commas with connective conjunctions omitted (as in the case of asyndeta or intentional comma splices), I find that strenuous to read since I have to figure out what the comma means in each context given the multitude of uses it has in such writing favoring almost exclusively periods and commas. It's typically a very minor increase in parsing effort on my part, but begins to add up if entire novels are written this way. Although I do like asyndeta a lot (less so splices), it helps me a lot when authors favor them to vary their punctuation and limit their uses of the comma to fewer contexts.
@@darkengine5931 I agree. Over the years, I've become well-acquainted with how/when to best use each of the major punctuations, and as you said, being consistent with how you use each one really helps the reader anticipate the flow of the sentence, thus making the reading experience more seamless.
@@coreyhuffman7607 That ability to anticipate and quickly dissect a sentence's structure seems to be the ultimate key to a smooth reading experience. Much of what initially drew me to study creative writing -- with your videos being among the most insightful -- was less so with a desire to write and more so with a desire to be able to understand why I seem drawn to certain styles of prose over others. Above all else, I quickly fell in love with Nicholson Baker's writing in university after encountering books like _The Mezzanine._ What perplexed me so much is that I find his prose near-effortless to read, but it ranks as "extremely difficult" post-graduate level literary fiction. Most literary fiction I encounter ranked so difficult is quite challenging for me to read and comprehend (especially coming from an ESL background), but I find Baker an exception; somehow his prose is really easy for me to read and I've always wanted to be able to better pinpoint why. He tends to write monstrously-long Proustian sentences connecting many loosely-related ideas in the lengthiest sentences/paragraphs. An excerpt: >> But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings - for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family - the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been. Boswell (and De Quincey, Edward Young, and others) had treated the sunken garden of a parenthetical phrase just as my mother had - as something to be prepared for and followed by the transitional rounding and softening of a comma. >> And such hybrids - of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too - might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subtler subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms - and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighting was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence. Despite looking like such an intimidating wall of text, I find it surprisingly easy to parse and comprehend. Another thing that impresses me so much about many of his books is that they have the most boring plot imaginable. For example, _The Mezzanine_ ultimately boils down to an office worker taking a lunch break and purchasing a pair of shoelaces, yet I find his books far less boring to read than I would have expected from the plot summary (and no doubt owed in large part to his writing prowess).
![[2] The Prose of Patrick Rothfuss | Three Critical Conjunctions: AND, BUT & THEN](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/sLim_1PboRw/mqdefault.jpg)
![[1] The Prose of Patrick Rothfuss | How to Write Seamless Transitions](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9TeUyvM8pDY/mqdefault.jpg)
I think you were right... I find the later option more appealing. Perhaps the cadence is better on the first, but it doesn't seem important enough of a plot point to necessitate cadence that seems more poetic than updating audience on status of character's condition.
I think you're right, Dan. I might save this semi-colon technique for a description/action that is a bit more intense, to warrant that more poetic feel.
Your examples are helpful and your way of explaining your choices and preferences, even more so. We have to find a way of alerting more aspiring readers to your existence! Have you considered a newsletter or website? What about creating some sort of giveaway, such as a tool for assessing some facet of our writing.
I'm glad you're finding the channel helpful, Bonnie. It means a lot that you feel the desire to share word of it. Personally, I'm not all that literate in the realms of social media, so I'm sure there are a few extra things I could be doing haha. I've been quite busy lately editing my debut novel, an epic fantasy titled, "Reflections of the Same", so I just haven't had the time. I'm sure I'll get around to an author website at some point, as well as a newsletter. But first I need a book! lol
@@coreyhuffman7607 Good point. I’m also in the process of editing and revising my first novel after publishing a few non-fiction books. Have a feeling you’re a fellow Canadian … :)
@@bonniezieman3424 What gave it away? lol
@@coreyhuffman7607 your keen intellect AND, in one of your videos you used the word ‘Celsius’. :)
I always loved semicolons used this way. I think a way to describe it in generalized terms might be something like this?
[Subject] [Verb] (Adv) [Object/Modifier] [; / ,] [Subject] [, / : / --] (Adv) [Object/Modifier]
"Some think it's a curse and others think it's a blessing."
---- "Some think it's a curse; others, a blessing."
---- "Some think it's a curse, others: a blessing."
---- "Some think it's a curse, others -- a blessing."
"The winters were so freezing and the summers were so scorching."
---- "The winters were so freezing; the summers, so scorching."
---- "The winters were so freezing, the summers: so scorching."
---- "The winters were so freezing, the summers -- so scorching."
I tend to prefer the em dash or colon when using the comma (instead of the semicolon). Doing so avoids repeating the comma it in the second clause and helps prevent it from looking like a splice with the omission of the verb.
On top of thinking of semicolons as something with a stronger cadence/closing than a comma but softer than a period, they can be thought of as "super commas" in a more generalized sense than lists (ex: "Houston, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Boston, MA"). I see them as clarifying the function of commas in between items/clauses connected by semicolons.
Since making this video, I myself may have shifted my preference to em dashes as well (in many cases, at least; semicolons are still an incredibly versatile punctuation). I've seen writers use semicolons in so many different ways.
@@coreyhuffman7607 Do you have a Discord if I may ask? I want a sentence-crafting bud! Most writers I encounter on there don't seem to care so much about this stuff and just focus on world-building and characters.
@@coreyhuffman7607 From a pure reader standpoint (although I also want to learn how to write more in accordance to my reading preferences), I always enjoyed authors who used a wide variety of punctuation -- periods, commas, semicolons, colons, parentheticals, em dashes, possibly even brackets for the likes of editorial comments and footnotes -- and varied simple/compound/complex sentence structures.
I'm not always a fan of prose that only uses periods and commas unless it's quite simple in its subject matter (not drawing connections between many interrelated ideas). The way I perceive it is that commas already serve so many overloaded functions (using programmer-style terminology): to separate subordinate/dependent clauses from main/independent ones, to separate items in a list, to explicitly distinguish between coordinate adjectives and cumulative/compound adjectives, to further separate dialogue from narration, as an alternative to the colon when beginning a list, etc.
Especially when such a writing style makes liberal use of commas with connective conjunctions omitted (as in the case of asyndeta or intentional comma splices), I find that strenuous to read since I have to figure out what the comma means in each context given the multitude of uses it has in such writing favoring almost exclusively periods and commas. It's typically a very minor increase in parsing effort on my part, but begins to add up if entire novels are written this way. Although I do like asyndeta a lot (less so splices), it helps me a lot when authors favor them to vary their punctuation and limit their uses of the comma to fewer contexts.
@@darkengine5931 I agree. Over the years, I've become well-acquainted with how/when to best use each of the major punctuations, and as you said, being consistent with how you use each one really helps the reader anticipate the flow of the sentence, thus making the reading experience more seamless.
@@coreyhuffman7607 That ability to anticipate and quickly dissect a sentence's structure seems to be the ultimate key to a smooth reading experience. Much of what initially drew me to study creative writing -- with your videos being among the most insightful -- was less so with a desire to write and more so with a desire to be able to understand why I seem drawn to certain styles of prose over others.
Above all else, I quickly fell in love with Nicholson Baker's writing in university after encountering books like _The Mezzanine._ What perplexed me so much is that I find his prose near-effortless to read, but it ranks as "extremely difficult" post-graduate level literary fiction. Most literary fiction I encounter ranked so difficult is quite challenging for me to read and comprehend (especially coming from an ESL background), but I find Baker an exception; somehow his prose is really easy for me to read and I've always wanted to be able to better pinpoint why.
He tends to write monstrously-long Proustian sentences connecting many loosely-related ideas in the lengthiest sentences/paragraphs. An excerpt:
>> But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings - for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family - the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been. Boswell (and De Quincey, Edward Young, and others) had treated the sunken garden of a parenthetical phrase just as my mother had - as something to be prepared for and followed by the transitional rounding and softening of a comma.
>> And such hybrids - of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too - might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subtler subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms - and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighting was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence.
Despite looking like such an intimidating wall of text, I find it surprisingly easy to parse and comprehend. Another thing that impresses me so much about many of his books is that they have the most boring plot imaginable. For example, _The Mezzanine_ ultimately boils down to an office worker taking a lunch break and purchasing a pair of shoelaces, yet I find his books far less boring to read than I would have expected from the plot summary (and no doubt owed in large part to his writing prowess).