“There’s a 19th century mustiness that hangs over the semicolon,” says William Zinsser in On Writing Well–one of the best all-time books on writing non-fiction. And that quote that pretty much sums up the problem.
Semi-colons (;) reek of mind-numbingly dull term papers. So 99% of the time they have NO business being used in marketing writing. Their very presence makes a sentence look hard to read and understand.
It’s far better to either…
- End the sentence and start a new one. Short sentences make your copy faster and easier to read.
- Use a dash. When you have a phrase that either adds to what you’re saying and needs to stand out from the rest for emphasis–using a dash keeps the momentum going.
The 1% of time when a semi-colon is ok is when you have a complex list of items that already have commas in them, and you’re the space you’re working with is too tight to do bullets. (for example, a directory listing)
In that case, using commas to separate the items would be confusing and dashes really don’t work.
But for everything else, it’s time to kill those semi-colons!
