"Marked decline in semicolons in English books, study suggests"

from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/18/marked-decline-semicolon-use-eng...

There's a quiz; I expect you all to get 10 out of 10.

Oh, dear, I only got 9/10. However I had chosen none of the above, but thought that the one they chose was a toss up.

I actually have a lot more difficulty deciding whether or not to use a comma.

Grrrr! 9/10. I disagreed with their choice of a semicolon before “however”, but they are probably right.

10/10

10/10. I do quite enjoy a semicolon; however, my favourite punctuation of all is — wait for it — the m-dash. I simply can't restrain myself, when writing more than a paragraph or two, from sprinkling one or the other in here and there. They add some spice to life. ;)

Not to brag, but 10/10. I share >5 GraceCollection: 's appreciation of the em-dash. Now there's a tricky punctuation mark. When to use an em-dash or an en-dash, and whether spaced or unspaced — virtuoso stuff. (I use a spaced em-dash because that was the house standard where I used to work. Not everyone agrees.)

10/10

When I want to irritate my editor wife, I send her a text with a spaced em-dash. It can also be used as a secret cry for help.

The joke is that AI tools are pretty good at lacing their text with semicolons and em-dashes, whilst most humans don’t even know where to find them on the keyboard. So the presence of “fancy punctuation” in any text that hasn’t been professionally edited is often now taken as a tell-tale sign of AI involvement. Worrying for those of us who do think we know how to use those things!

>9 thorold:
Yes, we never realised we were AIs.