Khanh Ho is writing the first Vietnamese American Detective Fiction ever.  Why?  Because being the first is a power trip.  In this installment, he humorously discusses the implications of punctuation.  Like what you read? Share, comment, subscribe. 

Late at night, I wake up with a start.  One of the large, looming questions I must face while writing this detective novel visits me like a phantom cat that sits on my chest, sucking out my breath; it asks me this question with its sandpaper tongue: “do you dare to use the semicolon?”

This may seem like a frivolous question and, really, beside the point of the craft of writing detective fiction.  After all, I have to handle so many important elements:  plot, action, character, setting.  But bear with me; you’ll see; I’m writing a first person narration.  The voice is hardboiled; the character, gritty.  The semi-colon is a boon; it is also a burden.

The semi-colon is a very useful punctuation mark.  It’s perfect for organizing thoughts, suggesting unspoken relationships between clauses and spelling out divisions between crucial parts of the sentence.  But its highly technical quality—the fact that it signals an extremely ordered, systematic mind—also represents its major drawback.  Is it too intellectual?  Does it come off as too smart and therefore make my character unlikeable?  Will I alienate a crucial part of my audience by inadvertently making both myself and my character come off as a pretentious piece of petrified poop?

I used to teach SAT prep while in grad school; the semicolon is one of those punctuation marks that signals a higher order of intellection.  Most students don’t know how to handle it, so the standard advice is to display your writing sophistication by sprinkling the essay with semicolons all over the SAT.  The hardest questions on the SAT multiple choice often feature the semicolon; there is some logic behind this:  my students in freshman composition at the exclusive liberal arts college I taught at just didn’t know how to use the semicolon.

The semicolon is the last, important punctuation mark that one gathers on the yellow brick road to knowledge.  It towers above the comma, the period, the question mark.  The exclamation point is the dingbat—that bleach blonde cheerleader who’ll have sex with the entire football team; the semicolon is the poindexter, like Cliff Clavin, the postman in that television show Cheers—a guy who will sit at the bar and tell you all sorts of Wikipedia-sounding crap he made up just to make himself seem important.  That semicolon will never get laid.

Did you like this? Make Khanh’s day:  Share on Facebook.  Tweet your friends.  Leave a comment.  Here’s a question to get you started:   are semicolons only for pretentious freaks with broomsticks stuck up their nether orifices?