Have you ever glimpsed a small semicolon tattoo on someone's wrist? While it may seem like an ordinary punctuation mark, the semicolon tattoo represents a symbolic movement far beyond basic grammar.

In 2013, Amy Bleuel founded the faith-based nonprofit Project Semicolon, which chose a semicolon as a symbol because it’s “used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence but chose not to.

Who knew a dot and a comma could mean so much? Sure, grammarians love their punctuation, and the debate over the semicolon's place between independent clauses in a long sentence has been the bane of ...