I sympathize. In another life I wrote for a newspaper occasionally, and I gave it up because I didn't have copy approval, and the voice I wrote in vs. the voice

I sympathize. In another life I wrote for a newspaper occasionally, and I gave it up because I didn't have copy approval, and the voice I wrote in vs. the voice they published were sufficiently different to me that I preferred to just not write if that was how it was reflected. However, the beauty of an editor/writer relationship is that the writer is who they are, and a good editor understands what readers like about them. These are rarely the same thing. I couldn't read anything I wrote after it was published, as if it were possible to die of cringe, I probably would have. They (it was a newspaper, their sub editors could have been anyone, and often I thought they most certainly were) knew their readership and what kept readers reading, and they managed my conceits like pros, because that's literally what they did for a living. This argument over semicolons, however, looks like a straight power struggle. A semicolon is what a writer uses to connect two poorly formed ideas to affect a single good one. Even as a writer, I would only ever expect to get one semicolon in the course of the entire relationship, and if I picked that hill to die on, the only situation I would bet it on would be the single idea I was known for - like taking down a sitting president, or the reasoned confidence my turn of phrase would turn the course of history. Otherwise, it's a domestic dispute. I have an exchange in my email from some years ago about a letter I sent to the Financial Times where, when they published it, the post-edit version was so off that I sincerely explained to the editor that my original phrasing was a reference to a common colloquialism, with the implication that I thought that english was not the editor's first language. She was as impressed by this as you can imagine, explaining back that she was in fact an accomplished athlete in the sport I was referencing. The ensuing thread should probably go down in writer/editor lore. As a writer, of course I would think that. It's why dealing with that sort of thing is a job. For similar reasons, I am waiting for an editor die-off at The Economist before attempting to be on assignment for them again. Those people live forever.