Okay. So say you have a sentence that you think is pretty good, and then suddenly you get someone telling you that you need a semicolon. A semi-what?
Many people get freaked out by the mere mention of it. I know several writers who have burst in tears because of them, in fact. Actually, that's a bit of a lie. I don't. But nobody likes semicolons. Why? Because they're tricky little bits of punctuation. They're half comma, half colon, and they look like this: ;
So how do you use them?
First of all, you use them a lot in something called "comma splices." Basically, a comma splice means that you added two independent parts of a sentence illegally. Let's say I wrote this:
"She clutched the teddy bear closer to her, he looked bored."
This would make no sense. Is she clutching the teddy bear closer because he looked bored? Or something more sinister? What really is happening???
The reason why this sentence is so funky is because they're are two different parts of the sentence (called clauses) stuck to each other that are independent. To make it sound logical, instead of writing a comma, which really doesn't make sense, you would write a semicolon. So I could (legally) write this instead:
"She clutched the teddy bear closer to her; he looked bored."
How is it read? Basically, if you read it out loud, it'll sound almost like a period... except not. So you would say it, letting the last syllable ring on before starting the second clause. The second clause is a lot more pronounced and regal-sounding than if you just split the two clauses into two sentences. And did I mention the second clause stands out more?
So use semicolons when you want to combine two clauses together when the second clause is the most important part and you want it to stand out.
Hopefully that makes sense?
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