{"id":3863,"date":"2017-05-13T09:30:18","date_gmt":"2017-05-13T14:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=3863"},"modified":"2017-05-13T09:30:18","modified_gmt":"2017-05-13T14:30:18","slug":"on-semicolons-and-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2017\/05\/13\/on-semicolons-and-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"On semicolons and writers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Data is everywhere these days, but <strong>Ben Blatt<\/strong> offers\u00a0a wonderfully refreshing apolitical crunching of numbers in a <em>Slate<\/em> article that asks the question, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/browbeat\/2017\/05\/03\/does_using_more_semicolons_make_an_author_more_pretentious.html\">&#8220;Do Semicolons Make You Pretentious?&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>His conclusion?<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;While semicolons are more present in the Pulitzer winners on the whole, it&#8217;s not a necessary condition to have them to appeal to literary circles. Some writers, like Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning <em>Lonesome Dove <\/em>had almost 650 semicolons per 100,000 words, choose to use them often; others, like Cormac McCarthy, who won a Pulitzer for <em>The Road <\/em>without using a single semicolon, choose to follow [Kurt] Vonnegut&#8217;s advice and avoid them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/files\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-13-at-8.25.11-AM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3864\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/files\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-13-at-8.25.11-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"622\" height=\"812\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/files\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-13-at-8.25.11-AM.png 622w, https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/files\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-13-at-8.25.11-AM-230x300.png 230w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 622px) 100vw, 622px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Data is everywhere these days, but Ben Blatt offers\u00a0a wonderfully refreshing apolitical crunching of numbers in a Slate article that asks the question, &#8220;Do Semicolons Make You Pretentious?&#8221; His conclusion? &#8220;While semicolons are more present in the Pulitzer winners on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2017\/05\/13\/on-semicolons-and-writers\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lists","category-updike-in-context"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3865,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3863\/revisions\/3865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}