Data is everywhere these days, but Ben Blatt offers a wonderfully refreshing apolitical crunching of numbers in a Slate article that asks the question, “Do Semicolons Make You Pretentious?”

His conclusion?

“While semicolons are more present in the Pulitzer winners on the whole, it’s not a necessary condition to have them to appeal to literary circles. Some writers, like Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove had almost 650 semicolons per 100,000 words, choose to use them often; others, like Cormac McCarthy, who won a Pulitzer for The Road without using a single semicolon, choose to follow [Kurt] Vonnegut’s advice and avoid them.”