True Confessions of a Legal Writing Professor: Semicolons Suck

Abstract

This article analyzes the semicolon from a legal writing professor’s perspective and suggests that we eliminate semicolons because educators today are less concerned with sentence-level mechanics and proper punctuation, and law students already face a steep learning curve on so many other, more fundamental levels. It also traces the history of the semicolon and suggests, as have other commentators, that it is a pretentious mark that can be replaced with periods, em-dashes, and other devices.

Keywords: Legal writing, semicolon, sentence-level mechanics, legal education