Each person has their own style that presents their uniqueness.

Before the onset of typewriters, the semicolon held a more accepted position and use. Now – it is nearly nonexistent, with people feeling it should be used sparingly, if not at all. Mostly, people feel the semicolon should be eradicated from American literature.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence has ten uses of semicolons to distinguish the parts. Granted, in the many discussions about semicolons, the use within the Declaration of Independence is still acceptable. However, when reading through more recent literature, those uses are not put into practice.

Why has the use of semicolons decline?

There may be a number of reasons, though let’s consider early typewriters. The earliest of the typewriters didn’t have a shift key and the number of keys were even more limited than they were later. Typewriters involved throughout a good portion of the Eighteen Hundreds.  To make a semicolon, one first struck the comma key, backspaced (likely having to nudge the carriage a smidge back), then strike the full colon on top of the comma.  Whew.  It’s a lot of effort for a semicolon. People probably decided it wasn’t worth the bother.

Early letters composed on typewriters were all in CAPS. The lowercase lettering was unavailable. 

In time, the shift key was added and greater number of characters became available, including lowercase letters and semicolons.  Even so, the decline of using semicolons continued. Possibly, typist didn’t want to exercise their right pinky – or they just got use to not having the semicolon as part of the writing due to the prior hassles.

Now, we’re seen a decline of the use of commas and spacings between sentences.  The radical reduction in the use of commas and spacings makes it harder to distinguish sentencing and intent.

Since language and writing evolves, let’s reconsider the demise of the semicolon and bring back its use, as well as double spacing between sentences and the benefits of commas, even dashes. The use in emphasizing statements has considerable bearing and writers have many thoughts they want emphasized.

Minor reduction of punctuation and spacing throughout books does not reduce the full number of pages much at all, and definitely not enough to strip away the character of literature.  Or is the trend for simplistic composition a sign of the juvenile expression of thought that seems to be permeating through the societies, a behavior that reduces the character and depth of written expression.

Even cursive writing – a faster way to script one’s thoughts – is being taught less and less.

Will the lowercase letters be the next to go? Will everything be reduced to capitalization in the effort to simplify the expression of thought?