Please welcome our newest editor and blogger, Kathryn Craft. *** It’s just a tiny dot, but it contains great power. Even as words add up to thoughts and thoughts layer with images that eventually result in complex notions capable of changing the world, one adding to the next and to the next within an extended sentence whose natural rhythms flow, then ebb, then surge in a manner seemingly dictated by the moon, it can dam. It can introduce staccato beats. Ramp up tension. Create edginess. Excite. It can introduce a contemplative space where ideas can be absorbed. It can cast a spotlight on the word just before it when the weapon of word order is carefully wielded. Calling it the “stop sign of the punctuation world,” literary agent and author Noah Lukeman devotes his entire opening chapter—22 pages!--to the period in his book A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. Lukeman underscores the period’s importance by listing the dangers of overuse (insufficient communication; chop...

My question: The dreaded semicolon. When I work in MSWord, it is forever telling me to replace a comma with a semicolon. I usually obey the MSWord wizard because I don’t seem to know what I’m doing. Is there some way to tell (some rule of thumb?) if what I have is two sentences—that should be broken up rather than use a semicolon? Thanks for your time. Billie A. Williams The Capricorn Goat Billie, A lot of writers find the semicolon mysterious. I’d like to see you take charge of your writing and not let the MS Word wizard boss you around about it. In order to do that, you need to view punctuation as a set of communication tools that you can use to signal your reader how you want them to interpret what you’ve written. The three basic punctuation tools are a comma, a semicolon, and a period. I often think of them as traffic signs. When I see a comma, I slow down. A semicolon tells me to yield, and a period shouts, “Stop.” It’s that simple. Think of one of your sentences wh...