Does the world need semi-colons?

Perhaps not the most pressing issue facing the planet. But I heard an interview recently in which a writer suggested that this particular punctuation mark was redundant, encouraged bad writing and should be done away with.

And you can kind of see the point. Except when it's used to separate items in lists, a semi-colon can always be replaced by a full stop. Shorter sentences tend to be more readable than long ones, so why make your sentences unnecessarily long by using semi-colons?

Certainly, a piece of writing that's littered with semi-colons will look untidy and will be hard to follow. But, personally, I think it would be a shame to do away with anything in the writer's armoury that allows for a little extra nuance of meaning.

The semi-colon allows you to create a closer association between two independent clauses than is possible with a full stop. If you want one thought to flow naturally on from another, then the semi-colon's what you need. It allows you to keep up the pace of a passage of writing, without the pauses created by full stops. So let's hang on to anything that has the potential to make writing just that little bit richer or more diverse.