God’s copy editors
2009 November 2
Does anyone else get annoyed by punctuation errors and grammatical mistakes in the Bible?
They need a few English majors on those translation teams.
Here is a good first rule. Stop using semicolons.
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I don’t know; I love semicolons.
BruceA beat me to it; I love semicolons, too.
The period does the same work with much less fuss or pretension, and people are much more apt to use the period properly.
I too would like to voice my support for the semicolon; it is a small but wonderful piece of punctuation.
I am in a den of heretics.
Not to be judgmental, but your final two sentences have their own punctuation problem – namely they would be better if made into a single sentence using a colon.
“Here is a good first rule: stop using semicolons.”
I actually agree with the point of your post. I generally favor translation efforts like the NLT and some others that simplify the English structure somewhat into shorter sentences.
Larry, no offense taken at all. That is an excellent point. A colon would have been appropriate there.