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I use semicolons all the time; they are easy and useful. The two clauses separated by a semicolon are sentences; thus the semicolon is logically and grammatica
by adrianratnapala 10y ago
I use semicolons all the time; they are easy and useful.
The two clauses separated by a semicolon are sentences; thus the semicolon is logically and grammatically equivalent to a full stop. (As long as you normalise the capitalisation). The difference is in nuance, flow, and other soft things.
So when do you use a semicolon instead of a full stop? Whenever you want to!
The really difficult punctuation mark in English is the full colon.
- kbenson 10y agoSure, which is what the rules always say, and is fairly straightforward. The hard part is actually using it because it usually looks so out of place to me. It's a chicken and egg problem, where semicolons are hard to comfortably use because they are so rare they look out of place when I try, and I assume part of the reason for their rarity is other people feel the same way.
- petertodd 10y agoWhat's a full colon? Hard/NSFW to google for that...
- dragonwriter 10y agoJust a plain colon, as an emphatic distinction from a semicolon.