Semicolon How To

When I went to school the teachers had a kind of hit and hope approach to the teaching of English. (I mean “hit and hope” in the sense a careful aim was not taken. I do not mean I was hit. Ever.) As I recall there was very little teaching of grammar rules or sentence structure. We would write stories, they would come back with red pen on them and from that we were meant to learn something. You could call it learning by osmosis. As opposed to say maths or sciences which are based on learning rules and formuli. So, my English learning was the victim of an English education.

The upshot of this was that when it came to learning a foreign language - in which they did talk about sentence structure, verbs (“They’re doing word.”) and grammar - I was a bit lost. How could I have been expected to learn about grammar in a foreign language when I’d never learnt it for my native tongue. I couldn’t. But if the language rules had been explained graphically and with some humour, I probably could have learnt in ten minutes what took years by the osmosis approach. Something like the How to use a semicolon cartoon from The Oatmeal would have been just the ticket.

Perhaps I sould have put a few more semicolons in this article; no.