It is a punctuation mark that Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest, while Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it: The semicolon. But why? When is it effective? And have we been misusing it? Tracing the rise and fall of the semicolon, Cecelia Watson journeys through a range of examples—from John Milton's manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail"—to reveal how traditional, hidebound grammar rules can get in the way of writing's true purpose: communicating with others.