Are semicolons frowned upon stylistically?
Try dropping some semicolons in favor of more sentences. That is, “Strunk and White don’t say much about the subject. They recommend semicolons when needed…”. Then see which you like better. If you’re writing to convince people that your side is right, more and simpler sentences might be preferable to complex sentence structure. Or might not.
I do the same thing, Prince; semicolons come to me almost as naturally as periods and question marks, and I’ve often wondered if I should be using them as much as I do. To expand on Strunk and White’s guidelines, semicolons separate independent, closely related clauses in a complex sentence. More here. Don’t get too enamored of semicolons, though; as ROU says above, they can get intimidating.
A university English prof once told our class that we should just avoid use of semicolons in our writing, and his reasoning for this was that we just didn’t know how to use it properly (you might think that this would have been the ideal time to teach us…). Instead he insisted that when we felt like using a semicolon we should use a dash. So, using your example, “Connecticut has a long shoreline – Wyoming is entirely land-locked.” I’ve done it numerous times on essays since and nobody has seemed to have a problem with it.
