Best of Week: Semicolons and Flow

Semicolons. That was the most interesting thing we talked about this week. Not to say that it wasn't an interesting week full of captivating discussions (describing it as anything less would be blasphamy), but the small discussion we had about semicolons, both Virginia Woolf's use of them in Orlando, and the relation between their roles in our literature and our minds was something that stuck out to me more than Orlando's dealings with modesty, chastity, and purity or other things of that nature.

Someone brought up how Virginia Woolf's extensive use of semicolons (as opposed to commas and periods) is part of the reason why her writing seems very close to the someone's actual train of thought. It doesn't seem overly planned out, and picked apart to the point of making it seem over-edited, the way people's writing (inadvertently) comes across. From a literary perspective I'm sure this is somehow brilliant or worth an award, because if it wasn't more people would be doing it, but I don't think I'm qualified to judge it on a literary basis. What really makes this element of her writing appealing to me, is how natural it seems. We've talked in class about how one of the goals of a good writer is to make the reader feel like they're inside the writer's head, and the way the natural flow of her writing mimics her thought is what takes readers inside her mind more than anything else.

I, as well as any other English student of ten years, know how much teachers love "varied sentence structure and punctuation" (that's a direct quote), and of course we've all heard the example people use when describing the importance of commas (let's eat dad AND let's eat, dad), but the real importance of varying punctuation and the way you structure your writing simply because that is how we think. Our minds don't function one sentence at a time, neatly capped off with periods and new paragraphs; we're not that linear, if we were it'd probably be much less interesting. Semicolons are a way to keep a thought alive, and continue the momentum of the last thought into the next one, the way people's thoughts have a tendency to link together. We can also see this idea appear in the way we talk, we don't end sentences and start new ones the way that we're taught to by third grade grammar textbooks, we pivot from one idea to the next, from one point to another, without considering if it would give us any squiggly green lines in Microsoft Word. The true beauty and art of Virginia Woolf is how natural she makes writing; I'm not sure if she ever encountered writer's block, because that'd mean she'd had to have completely stopped thinking altogether. I think blogging about here (I can't believe I just admitted to 'blogging') has made me realize even more how much I want to emulate the ease of her writing, and how she really invites reader's into the flow of her mind. That's what good writing feels like, making people feel like your thoughts are actually their thoughts; you're stepping into someone else's train of thought, but you don't think of it like that because it seems so real and normal and natural                      
September 19, 2011