Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
post
page
product
Want to stay in the loop with latest bookish news and views? Subscribe to HarperBroadcast!

Semicolon

By Cecelia Watson

 550.00 inclusive of all taxes

  • Amazon

  • Warning: Undefined variable $productid in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/woocommerce/content-single-product.php on line 399

    Warning: Undefined variable $productid in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/woocommerce/content-single-product.php on line 407
  • Or from your local bookseller.
We will notify you when the book is released!
Please allow notification and avoid private mode for this feature to work.

About the book

Cecelia Watson used to be obsessive about grammar rules. But then she began teaching. And that was when she realized that strict rules aren’t always the best way of teaching people how to make words say what they want them to; that they are even, sometimes, best ignored.

One punctuation mark encapsulates this thorny issue more clearly than any other. The semicolon. Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, it is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?

In this warm, funny, enlightening and thoroughly original book, Cecelia Watson takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the surprising history of the semicolon and explores the remarkable power it can wield, if only we would stop being afraid of it.

Forget the rules; you’re in charge. It’s time to make language do what you want it to.

Pages: 224

Available in: Hardback

Language: English

Cecelia Watson

Cecelia Watson is a historian and philosopher of science, and a teacher of writing and the humanities. She is currently on Bard College’s Faculty in Language and Thinking. Previously she was an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at Yale University, where she was also a fellow of the Whitney Center for the Humanities and was jointly appointed in the humanities and philosophy departments.

Read More

Books by Cecelia Watson

Recommended for You