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I'm gonna talk with you about the
semicolon and how to use it correctly in
a sentence I find it helpful to think of
punctuation in terms of driving
metaphors and so in this case the
semicolon would be like the California
stop you know when you're rolling up to
a stop sign and you tap the brakes but
you don't stop completely stopping
completely would be a period if you
don't stop completely and you keep
rolling through that's what I would call
a semicolon in other words it sort of
slows you down in the sentence you
almost come to a stop but not a full
stop this is what it would look like in
a sentence do not fear the semicolon it
often is optional so it's used to link
to ideas when we have two complete
thoughts in a sentence one way that we
can link them is through a semicolon and
in this case we have our first complete
thought do not fear the semicolon we've
got a subject a verb complete thought it
could be a sentence on its own but if we
want to join it to another idea we just
put a semicolon and then we move on to
our next idea it often is optional that
is also a complete thought so we've
correctly joined the two of them with
the semicolon and one thing I want you
to note is that the word it stays
lowercase so when there's a semicolon in
the middle of two thoughts still all one
sentence and we keep the word that comes
after it lowercase so that's how you use
a semicolon
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