I understand the reluctance to do this. I always point it out when someone uses a word incorrectly in the grammatical sense, and it makes me physically angry when public signs use "'s" to pluralize something, or when people use double quotes when they really just mean to emphasize what they're saying. But if no one uses semicolons, colons, dashes, ellipses, and the aforementioned parentheses out of fear, what will become of them?
There's a balance that people try to strike when they write, a kind of uneasy, simultaneous allegiance to both the way people talk and the way people think. Looking back as recently as Victorian fiction, you can see how ornate the sentences are, running on, changing direction, nesting ideas inside of other ideas. I've always admired that kind of structure. They actually use the shape of the language to add to the feel of what they're saying. Paragraphs about a summer in the country can meander like a river, or a tense encounter can look as clipped on the page as it should sound.
The era where brevity is the most important thing, I think, started with the Gettysburg Address. I've read that the reason it's such a famous speech is because of the way its words are laid out. Up until that fateful day, public speeches were constructed the same as if they were meant to be read, overblown and stuffed with filler. The attitude was that sheer volume added value (or at the least the illusion of value) to the ideas contained in it. Among all the other speakers that day near a battlefield in Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln stepped up and gave an almost unbelievably short speech, his ideas neatly parsed out in short sentences, clear and to the point. It caught the ear, emotive and succinct, easily memorizable, and that's why we still remember what he said that day. It was the first step in an evolution that has led us, for better or worse, to the era of the sound bite.
Today, this derivative, journalistic bent has crept even into everyday fiction. The prevailing opinion is that you should walk away from the page knowing everything there is to know. It all has to be explicitly there on the page, no ambiguity or subtlety added. I blame Hemingway for popularizing this style, and James Patterson for perpetuating it in his endless parade of thrillers with half-empty pages in each 500-word-chapter.
I'm much of the mind that we need to retain a place in our psyches for old-style, more long form sentences. But we also need to infuse it with the energy and immediacy of the words that we type with our thumbs. In order to do this, we need every punctuation mark at our disposal. This is why I wonder what Vonnegut was thinking when he disparaged semicolons. He apparently didn't know what to do with them, but they add a layer of subtext that you then don't have to convey with the words themselves. Here's what I do with all these wonderful, various marks:
Semicolons: I use these when what I'm about to say explains what I just said, but I don't want to put them in separate sentences because they're so closely related. "When I was a child, I was constantly climbing trees; I couldn't get enough of feeling the cooler, higher air on my face." Isn't that so much better than splitting these two related ideas apart? If you didn't, you'd think that the writer would get the same feeling by opening up a third-story window. But no, there's something about the fact that he's specifically climbing a tree that makes you think about it differently. A semicolon has a metaphorical and literal hook to it, which links it to the next clause.
Colons: Not only do I use these for introducing lists ("We need three things from the store: bread, baloney, and a gun"), but I also use it to show how one thing leads to another, like an arrow -- which is really what the list-introduction thing is doing too -- ("The thing you have to remember is this: even Vonnegut can sometimes be full of crap.") To me, the mark itself even feels like I'm looking down on the pillars of a gateway.
Parentheses/Dashes: Both of these marks are used to add little extras and asides into the text, but are subtly different. To me, parentheses are like the edges of a hole that reveal something beneath the page, something hidden or not-so-obvious... "Greg refused to eat mashed potatoes, even in restaurants (as a child, his mother had often refused him dessert unless he had eaten them all)." Dashes, though, create a kind of pedestal to lift the words up above the rest of the text... "We ran out of the school doors -- let's go ride our bikes! -- and dashed down the street."
Ellipses: These are my favorite. Three periods in a row, that physically trail off into empty space the way sentences that end with them would if they were spoken. I use them to indicate that there's more to a story than is being told, or a conclusion is being implied that the reader has to divine for themselves: "I wasn't the only one who hated summer camp that year...". I also use it when someone is being thoughtful, and is stating a fact but maybe hasn't figured out all of what it means yet: "Maybe there's a reason people are fascinated by this...". It's the most interactive of the punctuation marks, drawing the reader in and asking them to participate in filling in what's been left unsaid.
I was reading a bilingual children's book with my daughter a few weeks ago, and we started talking about how, in Spanish, there are upside-down exclamation points and question marks at the beginning of sentences, as well as the normally oriented ones at the end. And the concept struck me as brilliant. When you have a sentence that requires being shouted or asked, shouldn't you find this out before you're done reading/saying it? This makes perfect sense. English appropriates words and phrases from other languages all the time... this is one idea we should start using right away.
My point is this: English is a fascinating patchwork of other languages, taking what works (or is particularly insightful) from elsewhere and folding it into itself, always in the process of reinvention. And I'm not just talking about the written language. Our spoken language is expanding in amazing -- and amazingly fast -- ways. At the same time, people are wringing their hands and saying (as they have every time a new form of communication comes along) that we're losing it to the Tweetering and the LOLing and emoji-ing. I say that if we want to keep our written language vibrant and alive, it's got to be able to express what we feel in a way that can also represent the way people think. That's what it's there for, after all. And that process is different now in the 21st century. So let's give English some breathing room. Forget the random rules that Vonnegut, Strunk and White have tried to foist on us, "thou shalt not split infinitives" and all that. Let's allow sentences to flow and breathe and get the hell punctuated out of them. And if an informal, texty sort of English evolves alongside a lengthier, more expressive written version, then so be it. The Japanese have been doing it since their language's inception.
Being bilingual is never a bad thing.
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