Semi-Colonoscopy: Jackley Mispunctuates Draft Initiative Explanation

Marty Jackley, or whatever staffer drafted the Attorney General’s explanation of Mike and Julie Frye-Mueller’s doomed initiative to tax retail transactions instead of property, has a severe case of semi-colonitis. The draft explanation, released Friday for ten days of public comment, opens with two sentences that contain six semi-colons; all six are incorrect and should be stricken from the final language that would go on the initiative petition, circulator handouts, and 2026 ballot:

Currently, all real property, like land; homes; rental properties; and commercial buildings, are taxed according to a formula set by state law that accounts for the value of the property and its use. Those taxes are collected by the county treasurers and distributed to the counties; cities and towns; school districts; and other political districts, like road or drainage districts, in the county [Attorney General Marty Jackley, draft attorney general’s statement, 2025.10.17].

Semi-colons have two proper uses:

1. Separating two logically related independent clauses within a sentence, and
2. Separating complicated items in a list of three or more things.

Jackley cannot invoke either use to justify his semi-colonification of his opening two sentences.

Independent clauses are strings of words that can stand on their own as complete sentences. Look back at my second sentence in my introductory paragraph and at this sentence right here: the string of words before the semi-colon could stand on its own as a complete sentence; so could the string of words following the semi-colon. I join those pairs of independent clauses because they are logically related, working closely together to explain a point.

Now look at the items separated by Jackley’s three semi-colons in his first sentence:

1. …land
2. homes
3. rental properties
4. and commercial buildings…

…and then in his second sentence:

1. …the counties
2. cities and towns
3. school districts
4. and other political districts, like road or drainage districts, in the county.

None of those strings of words can stand alone as complete sentences. They are mere nouns, without verbs. In the first sentence, Jackley splits up his compound (i.e., multi-item) subject before reaching the verb phrase, are taxed, that makes even one independent clause possible. In the second sentence, Jackley gets one independent clause out, Those taxes are collected by…, and works toward making a compound verb phrase with a second verb, distributed to. He properly connects those two verb phrases (and, more completely, two predicates, which in this case are verb phrases followed by prepositional phrases) with and instead of a semi-colon, because he has not stated a new noun/subject that would mark the beginning of a second independent clause. But then he incorrectly deploys three semi-colons to break up the compound object of his preposition. Again, counties, cities and towns, school districts, and other political districts are all noun phrases, with no verbs that could make them independent clauses.

But maybe the writer thought that each of those quadripartite lists included complicated items that required semi-colonic separation. The writer aspired, perhaps, to punctuational greatness; however, the writer was wrong.

In terms of semi-colon rules, complicated means the item includes a comma that could confuse the reader’s flow through the list. For instance:

On my vacation, I visited Paris, Texas; Paris, Ontario; and Paris, France.

I visited three places. To distinguish each place, I must name the city and the state/province/country. When naming towns with their regions, we separate the two placenames with commas. Commas usually separate list items, but here, the commas are already separating the complicated placenames. If I tried to make commas do double duty and wrote I visited Paris, Texas, Paris, Ontario, and Paris, France, the reader would likely hitch after the second comma and ask, wait, you visited Paris twice? And then you went to Ontario? Only if the reader muddled past the and to the end might the reader be able to discern that I went to three places, all with the same name but in different regions.

Another instance:

For Sunday breakfast specials, Ingrid’s café offers ham, eggs, and grits; pancakes with lingonberry syrup, a unique recipe from Ingrid’s home village, Stjørdalshalsen; and lefse, lutefisk, and grapefruit.

Try that with only commas:

For Sunday breakfast specials, Ingrid’s café offers ham, eggs, and grits, pancakes with lingonberry syrup, a unique recipe from Ingrid’s hometown, Stjørdalshalsen, and lefse, lutefisk, and grapefruit.

Without semi-colons, the sentence drags the reader into uncertainty, if not complete confusion by the time we reach a unique recipe. Stjørdshalsen—is that a city or a sausage? Each special consists of multiple foods or, in the case of the pancakes, some additional description intended to make that lingonberry syrup sound even more delectable and exotic. The commas are so busy that they semi-colons to come in and do crowd control, to corral the complicated items into separate readable chunks.

Confusion arises if commas switch back and forth between functions mid-sentence. We avoid that confusion in complicated lists by letting commas handle necessary separations within each item while semi-colons step in to handle separations between items.

But wait! Jackley’s semi-colonist may cry. Look at the last item in the second sentence: “other political districts, like road or drainage districts, in the county” has two commas! Doesn’t that make it a complicated item, and doesn’t that trigger the need for semi-colons between the items?

Close, but not quite. Replace the A.G.’s semi-colons with commas and see how they read:

Those taxes are collected by the county treasurers and distributed to the counties, cities and towns, school districts, and other political districts, like road or drainage districts, in the county.

When the complicated item comes last in the list, we don’t need a semi-colon to help, because the last item is preceded not just by a comma but by a comma and and, the conjunction that tells the reader we’ve reached the end of the list. The commas have done their duty separating items and thus are free to handle any remaining grammatical duties in the rest of this clause. The last sentence, with its single complicated item at the end, needs no semi-colons.

The semi-colon-separated strings of words in each of the first two sentences of the Attorney General’s draft explanation of this ballot measure do not constitute separate independent clauses. Nor do those strings consist of complicated list items strewn with commas. Thus, neither sentence requires semi-colons. A.G. Jackley should correct those sentences by replacing all semi-colons with commas:

Currently, all real property, like land, homes, rental properties, and commercial buildings, is taxed according to a formula set by state law that accounts for the value of the property and its use. Those taxes are collected by the county treasurers and distributed to the counties, cities and towns, school districts, and other political districts, like road or drainage districts, in the county.

(p.s. One more error: In the first sentence, the verb should be the singular is, not the plural are. The subject of the sentence is property, singular. The subsequent list of examples of real property is plural, but it only modifies the grammatical subject and thus does not affect the need for the subject, property, to agree in number with the verb, is.)