Announcing the Semicolon Flag

The Brockelman Semicolon Flag
The Brockelman Semicolon Flag

This morning I glanced up and caught a Tweet posted by my friend Nick Piche (@nickwritenow). He’s an outstanding writer and poet. He loves punctuation as much as I do.

Nick wrote,
I am, and will forever be, an emphatic supporter of the Oxford comma.

I agreed wholeheartedly. As a copywriter, I defend the use of serial commas with a high passion usually reserved for much more personal issues.

Online conversation ensued. Nick claimed the Oxford comma flag; I claimed the semicolon flag. (I think the semicolon is sexy punctuation, underused, and powerful.)

My Semicolon Flag is up and flying. OK, Mr Piche… show me yours.

I know in my heart of hearts that some writer out there has a flag in mind for the guillemet.

By Stephen Brockelman

As a Sr. Writer at T. Rowe Price, I work with a group of the best copywriters around. We belong to the broader creative team within Enterprise Creative, a part of Corporate Marketing Services. _____________________________________________ A long and winding road: My path to T. Rowe Price was more twisted than Fidelity’s green line. With scholarship in hand, I left Kansas at 18 to study theatre in New York. When my soap opera paychecks stopped coming from CBS and started coming from the show’s sponsor, Proctor & Gamble, I discovered the power of advertising and switched careers. Over the years I’ve owned an ad agency in San Francisco; worked for Norman Lear on All in the Family, Good Times, Sanford and Son, and the rest of his hit shows; and as a member of Directors Guild of America, I directed Desi Arnaz in his last television appearance— we remained friends until his death. In 1988 I began freelancing full time didn’t look back. In January 2012 my rep at Boss Group called and said, “I know you don’t want to commute and writing for the financial industry isn’t high on your wish list, but I have a gig with T. Rowe Price in Owings Mills…” I was a contractor for eight months, drank the corporate Kool-Aid, became a TRP associate that August, and today I find myself smiling more often than not.

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