You're lucky today. I had to wade through 12 years of grammar school and 3 semesters of college before I had an instructor savvy enough to enlighten me on the use of a semi-colon. Yes, I know; you don't find semi-colons exciting. If you liked to write alot like I do, you would. Every tool in the box improves your skill level.

Well, here goes. (I will try to make this interesting.)

A run-on sentence can be fixed with a semi-colon. You remember run-ons. They're like the sentence that didn't know how to stop for a breath. Sometimes you just need a pause to collect yourself before you move on. The semi-colon does this for you. A sentence expresses a complete thought. It has a subject and an action or linking verb. (No I'm not going to explain these 4th grade terms)

Generally, a sentence needs nothing else to make sense. Since we can rarely leave well enough alone, sentences always seem to have to carry more weight than they need. If they have to carry the weight of a whole other sentence without a break, they run on.

If you must link two of these together and you don't like "and" or "but", then you must use a semi-colon. You just act like you've put in a period, only it's really a semi-colon, don't capitalize the next letter and keep on rolling. You can look at the first paragraph for an example of this; therefore, we have now covered most of this point.

When linking two sentences with one of those words that we usually start a sentence with and immediately throw in a comma, use a semi-colon. The last sentence in the previous paragraph will illustrate this.

There are times when that silly list just gets too cumbersome to handle. For Christmas I want a new car in blue, green, or red; a new pair of shoes for dress, casual, or exercise; and a good gaming system. Well, there you have it on this point. You can now go smugly before the ignorant masses and proclaim yourself the master of the semi-colon; pause for cheers and move on.

Learn more about this author, Allen Teal.
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