But modern style definitely tends toward short sentences. With a lot of periods. Even if you create sentence fragments. Sort of Hemingway-esque.

Which does tend to deprecate semi-colons. I enjoyed Eats, Shoots and Leaves. But, as a participant in my company's semi-formal writing style group, I found a lot of the examples contrived and overly complex. As in programming, once you get into trying to figure out the official precedence of operators, you've already lost the game. Rework things so the answer is immediately obvious to people who don't remember whether booleans are computed before exponents.