Kidder and Todd's "Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, " to be published Tuesday.

WSJ: Word Craft: Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd on Good Prose

Two recent examples hit home why the semicolon, otherwise despised by writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut, is indispensable to the art and architecture of prose.

FORBES: Satmars, Simone de Beauvoir And semicolons