Why So Many Semicolons In Science Of Survival ?

Recently the story of how Hubbard had a ghost writer transcribe Science of Survival and contribute to its creation came up on the Underground Bunker with accompanying details .

Oh , here the semicolon removal issue has been brought up again . DM famously said Science of Survival had three thousand , eight hundred and twenty five punctuation " errors " that went totally unnoticed by Hubbard despite his personally supervising students and auditors and CSing for decades .

Look , SOS was written with a horrible mash up of rhetorical techniques to overwhelm and confuse readers . If you study rhetoric and hypnotic writing techniques and methods of hypnotic induction it can become clear what methods Hubbard tried to stack or combine in creating this monument to pseudoscience and incomprehensibility. I know Hubbard used a ghostwriter but the final product has these methods laid down throughout the entire book.

In particular Hubbard used complex and confusing terms , information overload , new and vague terms , contradictory and vague statements , outrageous and unbelievable statements and other basic methods to make an audience more suggestible. Now these methods are only partially effective on some people on the most effective and efficient of attempts . They only work to a limited degree .You can only fool or significantly influence a small percentage of people with this . But that has been thought to be capable of being dramatically improved with the most basic and powerful of persuasive methods : repetition.

Hubbard in SOS sought to combine the persuasive methods of confusion aka paradox , repetition , attention control via focus or division and mimicry . These were all the most basic forms of his beloved subject hypnosis.

In constructing SOS it is an attempt or experiment in my opinion in combining the confusion method from conversational hypnosis and loaded language to covertly influence and tons of vague and complex terms to further confuse and scientific sounding new terms mixed with many , many medical terms to seem scientific with no substance . Hubbard combined the fasle tone scale , the plagiarized theta mest theory to use sublime writing , repackaged Nazism and his other stolen and hidden ideas to try to ambitiously pound a superconcentrated combination of rhetorical techniques.

Humorously SOS flopped and has never caught on despite being promoted as the backbone of the science in Scientology for decades and even required on courses like the heavily promoted PTS/ SP course.

My opinion is Hubbard succeeded far too well in confusing readers - by far , far too much overload of confusion technique he just confused them without persuading them . That can happen if you overdo it and he certainly did by a mile .

He unfortunately got better at this by the advent of study tech and learned a better recipe for thought reform by then . He had been stealing ideas and trying things and with study tech he knew that could covertly do the job.

But the point of this whole trip down hypnotic and rhetorical memory lane is this : Hubbard knew semicolons divide attention between one part of a sentence and the next . Attention division with semicolon after semicolon was meant to increase suggestibility .

 It may seem absurd but that was Hubbard's intent . He wanted you to read a sentence see a semicolon - think what follows elaborates on what you just read and so keep a little attention on the earlier statement . And by doing this hundreds of times Hubbard sought to knock out your critical and independent thought regarding the material you were reading.

So , in my opinion the semicolons were intentional and ineffective in persuading people. So DM can stop blaming a "transcription error" on some scapegoat.