we see student semicolons a la shmoop
your best friend Lila loves Disney
movies her favorite is Beauty and the
Beast
she loves the part where Gaston falls
off the castle okay she's a little grim
well it's perfectly okay for you to
mention Lila's favorite Disney movie and
the reason why she loves film in two
separate sentences
feel free to bust out the semicolon here
instead leave it or not the semicolon
doesn't exist just so you can text a
winking emoticon nope this punctuation
mark serves to splice two shorter
sentences that are closely related to
each other together so say you have a
paragraph of short sentences Mary hated
her shoes they were too small they were
also ugly her mom had bought them on
sale too many choppy sentences can be
boring for the reader once you read it
cleverly like we just did the semicolon
allows you to spice up your sentence
structure so you end with Mary hated her
shoes they were too small semicolon they
were also ugly her mom had bought them
on sale well your reader is less bored
yay now make them clown shoes and your
Willian business you also use a
semicolon when you want to point out the
relationship between two clauses take
these two sentences please
Jane's pants were too short and everyone
could see her hairy ankles there's a
clear relationship between these two
sentences so why not string them
together with a semicolon then you end
up with Jane's pants were too short
semicolon everyone could see her hairy
ankles you never use semicolons with
coordinating conjunctions like and or
and but with one exception for example
say you have the sentence Sara has a
shrine to Twilight in her room but she
hides it from her friends here the
punctuation mark between Twilight and
but needs to be a comma now for the
exception say your sentences lots of
girls have Twilight shrines including
Sarah in Muleshoe
Texas semicolon Leslie in stop Arkansas
semi
and Linda in hellhole Palms California
because you're listing girls with
Twilight shrines in this sentence and
because commas are already being used to
separate cities from states semicolons
are needed to separate each girl in the
list from the others
one instance where you always use a
semicolon is when a conjunctive adverb
is in play conjunctive adverbs are not a
disease instead they include words like
however therefore and indeed say you
have two sentences I put off writing my
paper all week and therefore I will be
pulling an all-nighter if you want to
combine these two sentences into one
you'd insert a semicolon between week
and therefore and end up with I put off
writing my paper all week semicolon
therefore I will be pulling an
all-nighter if you're having trouble
remembering that coordinating
conjunctions require commas and
conjunctive adverbs need semicolons try
this trick coordinating conjunctions are
small words like and or and but and they
all need small commas conjunctive
adverbs are bigger words like however
they're for and indeed and they need
bigger separation yeah the semicolon
anyway we know Lila's your bestie and
all but might we recommend you get some
new friends
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