"The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword"

Holding a pen is holding a weapon.

            I can slash through sentences without mercy. I can silence whole paragraphs in seconds. I can defeat an army of punctuation marks with a swift movement of my hand, forces of commas and periods and question marks transforming into exclamation points before they’re obliterated, flattened into inky scribbles on a white page.

            I can chew on verbs and devour my nouns. I can squash a period until it’s a comma and I can stretch a colon into an exclamation point. I can mold question marks into apostrophes.

            A pen is a hand.

            It can strangle a paragraph until it’s choking up sentences. It can rip letters from a word and then throw them across a page. It can tear two quotation marks apart and flip one into a comma and convert the other into an apostrophe.

            I can build a home for thousands of verbs and can set free a million adjectives. It can release hundreds of adverbs into the wild and it can pull them back when it needs just the right word. It can make a kingdom of similes and a country of metaphors. It can record the course of history and it can write and rewrite the future. It can free a million thoughts and catch a hundred possibilities.

            Holding a pen is holding the world in your fingertips.

Author's Note: "The pen is mightier than the sword." William Shakespeare. This is my favorite prose-y type thing I've written. (7.1.13)
~N 

The Semicolon

A sentence with a semicolon is a sentence an author could have finished but chose not to. A thought that could have ended but was left unfinished. Like a black-and-white painting that needed color but never got any. Like the artist couldn’t decide what colors to use from his grand pallet but if he knows one thing it’s that his painting isn’t complete. It can’t end there.

            A sentence with a semicolon is a giant bowl of soup. It’s Mom’s homemade chicken noodle with all its carrots and bits of celery, all its chicken chunks and noodles. Yet still, after every spoonful, the practiced chef knows for certain that something is missing—a pinch of salt, perhaps, a sprinkle of pepper forgotten from the recipe.

            A sentence with a semicolon is a girl wondering why her sentence isn’t over yet. It’s a girl wondering why the author would decide to continue a paragraph that doesn’t make any sense. Why would someone go through choosing such a complicated punctuation mark to continue a thought that is already finished? Why even bother? It’s a girl who thinks her sentence is better off a short, simple one, because even though a sentence with a thousand words and five hundred semicolons can be a beautiful one, a short one with a simple period at the end causes much less trouble. She doesn’t understand that the semicolon itself is an outcast—not a comma, not a period, but an awkward in between not yet acquainted with the common pen. She doesn’t understand that even though it’s not one or the other—a period or a comma—it can still be used. It can still find a place among the words; it can still weave itself onto a page and be accepted as a part of a beautiful sentence. 

Author's Note: I wrote this because of what a girl said to me once on semicolon day, 4.16.13, which is a day where all those who are depressed, hurting themselves, lost a loved one, etc... draw a semicolon on their wrist. A semicolon represents a sentence the author could have finished but chose not to. You are the author and the sentence is your life. 
~N