The Semi-Colon in Descriptive Writing

The Introduction

Let’s say your character steps through a door and sees a whole new world.

This means you have a setting to describe. It’s an important setting – not one you can just skate over. It would be no good writing something like, “John stepped through the door and saw an amazing garden” … and then just moving on to something else.

At this point, the reader needs some sort of description of the setting. She’d want to know, at the very least, what the garden was like and what was in there.

This means that you will need to provide a description. One way to do this is in the form of a list of items each of which is described in detail.

But there is a problem: How do you ensure that you describe the scene and each item within it in detail whilst ensuring that the description as a whole remains coherent?

This is where the semi-colon can come in useful.

The Discussion

Let’s remind ourselves of the main purpose of punctuation: It is to make sure that words – or groups of words – are kept separate, so as to avoid any “blurring” between different ideas or what I like to call “Units of Sense.” If this happens, there is a glitch in the reading and misunderstandings can occur:

A classic example of sentence causing this problem is the following:

“If a pregnant lady smokes her baby will be damaged.”

Just for a moment, you would have thought the sentence was about “pregnant women smoking their babies.” The Units of Sense – “a pregnant lady smokes” and “her baby” – were blurred. This cause a glitch in understanding, which is only rectified once you’ve come to the end of the sentence.

No writer should be making their reader do that kind of work!

This momentary misunderstanding occurred because the writer had failed to use a comma to separate the two ideas in the sentence: “If a pregnant lady smokes, her baby will be damaged.”

The semi-colon does a similar job to the comma: it separates up Units of Sense or “chunks of meaning” to ensure that something can be readily understood.

An Example

Let’s go back to the description of a setting. As an example, I’ll use the description of the garden from the opening chapter of “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman.

The main character has just moved house and has just gone out into the garden. At this point Gaiman decides to use a descriptive pause. He wants to take a moment to describe this setting:

“She explored the garden. It was a big garden: at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away; there was an old garden, filled with a rockery that was all rocks; there was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod on them.”

Now he could have done it like this:

“She explored the garden. It was a big garden. At the very back was an old tennis court. There was an old garden. There was a rockery and there was a fairy ring.”

This is grammatically correct, but a bit limited. Given the original, Gaiman clearly wanted to create a stronger sense of dilapidation and so needed to insert more detail.

He could have done it like this:

“She explored the garden. It was a big garden: at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away. There was an old garden, filled with a rockery that was all rocks. There was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod on them.”

With full stops the sentence is grammatically correct. Each sentence represents a Complete Thought. Therefore, a full stop should satisfy. You wouldn’t mark this as incorrect by any means.

However, although each description of each item in the garden is a Complete Thought, there is still a problem. Each item forms part of a larger, over-arching idea which is the character’s observation of the garden as a whole.

There is, therefore, a close relationship between the items being listed. The character observes that is a “big” garden. Then, the writer goes on to list items to give a sense of the scale of the garden, the things that are in it, and detailed descriptions of them. Only once that larger Complete Thought has come to an end is full stop used.

Why not use a comma? Let’s see what it looks like using commas:

“She explored the garden. It was a big garden: at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away, there was an old garden, filled with a rockery that was all rocks, there was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod on them.”

A comma leads us to expect another point about the thing just described. So if Gaiman wrote, “at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away, …”, the comma leads me to think that he is going to add another point about the tennis course. Instead, however, he wants to move on to write about the “old garden” part of the “big garden”.

To summarise: using a full-stop would suggest that description of the garden had come to an end, and the writer was going to move onto another point. Using a comma would suggest that the writer had something else to say about the tennis court.

We need something else -something that enables the writer to signal to his reader that:

a/ he is moving on to describing another item but that

b/ each separate description forms coherently remains part of an overall whole.

This is where the semi-colon steps in.

In a way, the semi-colon does the job of a full-stop and comma at the same time. The full stop part of it signals that that a Complete Unit of Thought has come to an end; the comma part of it tells us that there is, in fact, more to come.

So let’s look again at the original and correct version with the semi-colons:

“She explored the garden. It was a big garden: at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away; there was an old garden, filled with a rockery that was all rocks; there was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod on them.”

What does the writer want to do? He wants to describe the big garden and the items within it. He also wants to give a detailed description of each of the items within it.

What we have then is one Mega-Idea or Mega-Unit of Sense – “a big garden” that is being observed by the character. This is the over-arching Complete Thought mentioned earlier.  We also have Mini-Units of Sense each of which is part of the over-arching Complete Thought – the tennis court, old garden and the fairy-ring.

In the text below, we have the Mega-Unit of Sense – the garden. Each highlighted section marks each Mini-Unit of Sense. The surrounding black line marks the over-arching Mega-Unit of Sense:

“She explored the garden. It was a big garden: at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away; there was an old garden, filled with a rockery that was all rocks; there was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod on them.”

The semi-colons ensure that the description of each item is kept separate. It also ensures that we understand that each separate description coherently remains part of the overall observation and exploration of the garden by the character.

The use of the semi-colons ensures that there is no “blurring” between Units of Sense, that there are no glitches or misunderstandings. Only when we come to the full-stop at the very end is it clear that this particular description has now come to an end.

In the Classroom

In order to achieve highly at GCSE, students need to be able to demonstrate that they have control over a range of punctuation. Using a semi-colon in the above way – to separate items in a list each of which has an extended description – is a relatively simple way of being able to use this particular piece of sophisticated punctuation.

The explanation needn’t be as lengthy and as involved as the one I’ve given above, but it’s useful for students to understand the idea of lots of “Mini-Units of Sense” contained within an over-arching “Mega-Unit of Sense.” It helps students see the job that the semi-colon does and gives them a clear rationale for using it.

A few things to bear in mind:

• Note all of the sections (except the one at the start) begin with “there was”. It’s a good idea to tell students to begin each of their sections with “there was”. It keeps things simple and clear

• The final section can start with “and” but does need a semi-colon to precede it. This is different from a comma which is not needed before the “and” introducing the final section.

• Note the colon to introduce the description:

It was a very big garden:

This is another example of sophisticated punctuation that is both simple and natural to incorporate in this instance. The colon does the job of introducing the extended description that follows.

This all sounds quite complicated so the best thing to do is to give it a go. Below are some more examples that students can do, using the Gaiman example as a model.

You can give students the first line with the colon and then have students write the rest.

A: The castle came ominously into view:

B: The classroom was a mess:

C: It seemed the burglar had taken everything precious:

These are the kind of things that the students could come up with. They can serve as set-piece descriptions that can be dropped into a piece of writing, suitably adapted of course. Note how in B and C, final sentences shift to a new topic, so that semi-colons aren’t needed.

A: The castle came ominously into view: its gate rose up like a giant mouth ready to swallow me; its turrets stuck out darkly on either side; and its walls hid soldiers ready to fire their arrows.

B: The classroom was a mess: there were upturned tables and chairs everywhere; there were files, folders and paper strewn across the floor; and there was graffiti scrawled on the walls and board. Who had done this? And why?

 C: It seemed the burglar had taken everything precious: my watch that my father had given me and which he’d inherited from his father was gone; the diamond necklace my mother had given me on eighteenth birthday was gone; and the beautiful bracelet I’d bought on my travels to India had gone too. It was clear that whoever had done this knew what they were looking for and where to find it.