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Moneyball's Semi-Colon

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For anyone who has ever wondered what it might be like to be a fly on the wall in a big league club house, reading Moneyball might be the closest one can get. Yes it is enlightening. Yes it provides insight how big league teams draft. And yes, it is a great profile of Billy and the Oakland A’s . But what really sets Moneyball apart is its tone. Reading this book feels like having a conversation with an old buddy. It feels like getting insider tips from a wizened old man over beers at a dingy bar. In short, it’s conversational. Of course there are a number of factors that contribute to book’s tone, but the central element is punctuation. No, punctuation is not the sexiest element of writing, but it’s one of the most important. In Moneyball, …show more content…

How very drab. Anyone who has worked with developmental English students is familiar with the wretched abuse that is often heaped upon the semi-colon; in the inexperienced hand it is treated as comma, a period and sometimes even, gasp, a full-colon. In academia strange and mystical semi-colon boundaries are often employed: only one semi-colon is allowed per paper; or, semi-colons should only be used in …show more content…

As readers see in Moneyball, no other device is more effective at supporting Lewis’s conversational tone than the semi-colon. People don’t speak in properly punctuated sentences. They speak in long, winding interconnected sentences. By using a semi-colon to link clauses, Lewis mirrors this speech pattern: “It wasn’t fair to her; you had to give the girl chance to turn you down” (44). Although readers might not immediately notice why this sentence reads like banter rather than say, an essay, they will notice that it’s happening; and it’s happening because of the semi-colon. Consider the same sentence with alternative punctuation: It wasn’t fair. You had to give the girl a chance to turn you down. Sure, maybe this still works, maybe no content is lost, but the tone shifts. It takes on a more formal, jauntier nature. If not a full period, how about a comma and conjunction: It wasn’t fair, for you had to give the girl a chance to turn you down. Now the tone is totally lost. No one outside of Dickensian London speaks like this, and if they do; they

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