Summary: Kurt Vonnegut advised against using semicolons, but he employed them regularly in his own writing. Learn about the eight different ways he used semicolons:
What Vonnegut Said about Semicolons
When the topic of semicolons arises, inevitably, someone will mention Kurt Vonnegut. Even people who don’t spend their lives writing, editing, and thinking about punctuation tend to know the famous advice he gives in A Man Without a Country:
Here is a lesson in creative writing.
First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
I’ve never understood why people consider this to be earnest advice; after all, it’s Vonnegut. Furthermore, it only takes him 111 pages to violate his own rule.
When I saw the topic come up on a recent social media post, I decided to do a little study. I gathered up all the ebook versions of his works that I have and extracted the sentences with semicolons. As it turns out, Vonnegut really likes showing that he’s been to college.
Vonnegut’s Semicolon Uses
One of the reasons people avoid using semicolons is because they aren’t really sure how this hybrid (in lieu of Kurt’s more colorful adjectives) punctuation should be used. In the 24 books that I surveyed, I catalogued:
- 568 original semicolon instances
- 67 semicolons in quotations
- 8 different grammatical uses
I’ll describe the types of grammatical uses I noted, giving examples from Vonnegut’s books, and then follow up with the numbers.
Apposition
Apposition is a technique used to describe or clarify a word, typically a noun or noun phrase, by adding an additional word or phrase after it. It is sometimes offset by punctuation like commas or parentheses.
For example:
I’ve read the biggest book on my shelf, the 50th anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, a dozen times.
In the above example, the phrase between the commas further describes the noun phrase “the biggest book on my shelf.” Apposition is a fairly common technique used in writing, and once you know how to spot it, you’ll start to see it everywhere.
Apposition using semicolons is fairly rare. Vonnegut only has a few instances, but they are straightforward. For example, in Armageddon in Retrospect, he writes:
But the impression I have is that in Dresden—in the physical city—were the symbols of the good life; pleasant, honest, intelligent.
The adjectives “pleasant, honest, intelligent” describe the “symbols of the good life.”
Another appositive semicolon occurs in Player Piano:
That secretaries should be armed was a regulation held over from the old days, too; one Kroner thought well enough of to revive in a directive.
Here we see that the “regulation held over…” is “one Kroner thought well enough of…” The remaining few appositive semicolons are similar.
Conjunctions
Semicolons are sometimes used in place of commas for conjunctions. Other than simple substitution, there seems to be a few reasons why Vonnegut used a semicolon instead of comma:
- To indicate a slightly longer pause;
- When the sentence becomes so complex that a comma might be confusing; or
- As part of a wordy list (these I tended to categorize as Lists – see below).
The simplest example of the first type I found was in Palm Sunday:
We know too much for old-time religion; and in a way, that knowledge is killing us.
I think we’re meant to read this with just a hint of hesitation between clauses, versus a comma where we might be more likely to just move right into the second clause. It may help to know that this sentence occurs in the context of a speech, where controlling one’s hesitations and pauses would help with the cadence and emphasis of the talk.
We can turn back to Player Piano for an example of when a comma might make the sentence harder to read given its complexity:
Kroner, in fact, had a poor record as an engineer and had surprised Paul from time to time with his ignorance or misunderstanding of technical matters; but he had the priceless quality of believing in the system, and of making others believe in it, too, and do as they were told.
Given the number of conjunctions and commas the sentence has already, it’s easy to see why Vonnegut wanted to use a semicolon to distinguish between the two halves.
Dialogue
There are only a handful of these (literally 5), but in a few instances Vonnegut uses semicolons instead of commas in dialogue tags to show a continuation of the speech.
We’ll give Player Piano a rest for the moment and use an example from Cat’s Cradle instead:
And then he sang. ‘Rockabye catsy, in the tree top’; he sang, ‘when the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock.…’
The other few examples are very similar to this.
Equivalence
Traditionally, one of the most common uses of semicolons is to show some sort of grammatical equivalence between the two halves of the sentence. Vonnegut uses this type of semicolon 165 times in the works I reviewed.
The scholastic rule is that the clause on each side of the semicolon should be an independent clause. For example, in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut writes:
They were shot; they were poisoned.
In some cases, Vonnegut uses fragmentary (or dependent) clauses on both sides of the semicolon. I marked these as signaling equivalence as well. One such example occurs in Welcome to the Monkey House:
A knight and a pawn, my boy; a knight and a pawn.
Where there was an inequality between the clauses on each side of the semicolon (e.g., independent clause on one side, dependent on the other), I categorized the instance as a fragment. See below for more on that.
Exclamation
In two instances, Vonnegut put a semicolon after an exclamation:
- Once in Jailbird: “Oh; thank God you’re still alive!”
- Once in Player Piano: “No; but if it hadn’t been for men like me, he might have a machine in the plant—”
Fragments
In a sense, what I’m calling “fragments” are just another form of equivalence. However, with these examples, the clauses on each side of the semicolon are grammatically unequal.
These fragments typically take the form of independent clause + semicolon + dependent clause, where the dependent clause acquires the antecedent clause’s subject (and sometimes also verb).
For example, in Slaughterhouse-Five:
Tralfamadorians wearing gas masks brought her in, put her on Billy’s yellow lounge chair; [they] withdrew through his airlock.
I added [they] in the above quotation to show how the dependent clause acquires the antecedent subject. The implied subject makes each side of the sentence conceptually equally, despite the grammatical unevenness.
Lists
Vonnegut’s most common use of semicolons is in lists. Some of these are relatively simple, if long. Others are parts of much more complex sentences.
Because I haven’t quoted from The Sirens of Titan yet, I’ll use the following example:
But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired.
Most of the examples are neither this long nor this complex.
Poetry
Most poetic uses of semicolons fit into one of the categories above. For example, Welcome to the Monkey House has:
I ate beneath a roof of orange;
Swung with progress like a door hinge.
This is a fragment according to my classifications. But I like having poetic uses separate. If you don’t like it, do your own study.
Vonnegut’s Semicolon Usage Breakdown
The following table shows how many semicolons Kurt Vonnegut uses in each of the books I reviewed.
The numbers do not include semicolons that are part of quotations – as far as I could identify them. (Vonnegut quotes freely from the Bible, Shakespeare, folk songs, and even the U.S. Constitution, among other sources.) Neither do they include prefatory material or back matter.
| Book | Count |
|---|---|
| A Man Without a Country | 1 |
| Armageddon in Retrospect | 40 |
| Bluebeard | 2 |
| Breakfast of Champions | 3 |
| Cat’s Cradle | 118 |
| Deadeye Dick | 3 |
| Fates Worse Than Death | 15 |
| Galapagos | 11 |
| God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian | 2 |
| God Bless You. Mr. Rosewater | 4 |
| Hocus Pocus | 1 |
| If This Isn’t Nice What Is? | 14 |
| Jailbird | 33 |
| Look at the Birdie | 17 |
| Mother Night | 17 |
| Palm Sunday | 56 |
| Player Piano | 107 |
| Slapstick | 7 |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | 2 |
| The Sirens of Titan | 18 |
| Timequake | 1 |
| We Are What We Pretend to Be | 28 |
| Welcome to the Monkey House | 68 |
So should I use semicolons?
At the end of the day, it’s up to you whether you use semicolons or not. You shouldn’t listen to Kurt Vonnegut; or Curtis Weyant, either, for that matter.
I personally like them. You’ve probably noticed that I used them in this article, and not just in the examples I pulled from Vonnegut’s books. But just because I use them sometimes doesn’t mean you should. (It also doesn’t mean I should, but “should” is subjective anyway.)
Really, the only people you should listen to about semicolons are whoever is paying you to use them. Or not use them, as the case may be. Beyond that, follow your heart.