02-19-2008, 02:49 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/nyregi...colon.html
Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
âWhen Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,â Kurt Vonnegut once said. âOld age is more like a semicolon.â
In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a âNew York sentence.â In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they donât pause to contemplate.
Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
âWhen Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,â Kurt Vonnegut once said. âOld age is more like a semicolon.â
In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a âNew York sentence.â In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they donât pause to contemplate.
![[Image: boston.jpg]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v314/FattyJ16/boston.jpg)
