Are semicolons frowned upon stylistically?
I would have thought that semicolons would be verboten in legal writing. If you need to disambiguate nested lists, you should do so clearly with numbering, which then also lets you refer to list items clearly. Semicolons, and all other forms where phrases are conjoined by mere apposition, foment ambiguity. Doesn’t legalese depend on sturdy “ands” and “ors”? On the other hand, semicolons are a lovely way of conveying cadence in writing. To me, they provide a wee caesura; something less than a full stop but more than a comma’s worth of pause.
I have to force myself to use semicolons instead of dashes sometimes. Nothing I love like dashes. Half of my proofreading/revision process is reworking sentences without the dashes. That is to say, I use semicolons typically as I would dashes — to express a medium-length pause or connect two thoughts that don’t warrant whole sentences of their own.
