The semicolon has been described as a "graceful pause" in writing. But this graceful punctuation mark is being forgotten.

Semicolon use is down, and its slide is making headlines. In the U.S., these punctuation marks are appearing in published ...

Check out the first sentence of this column to see a semicolon at work. Instead of a semicolon in the middle, I could have used a period, creating two sentences out of one.