My GCSE English teacher had many fun little quirks, one being that he hated semicolons with a fiery vengeance. He considered them useless articles, easily and better replaced with other forms of punctuation.
Did anyone else have this? A teacher who just sort of religiously took against a random feature of the language? He was pretty good-humoured about it, but still. That’s weird, and I’m saying that.
I, however, use them all the time. Okay, partly because I formed a habit in response to the above just to be contrary; fair comment. However, the semicolon wouldn’t exist if it didn’t serve a purpose, so let’s dive in.
A semicolon is effectively a “super-comma” used to link two complete, but closely related sentences as if they were clauses in one complex sentence, just like I did in the preceding paragraph. “… just to be contrary,” and “fair comment,” are sentences in themselves, and I used a semicolon to smush them together into one. A comma won’t work, because they only join sentence clauses, not sentences.
Basically, when a comma doesn’t feel like enough but a full stop feels too much, throw a semicolon in there and see if that works.
Now, my former teacher probably would have told me to just make them separate sentences, but I feel that a full stop would create a full-stop-level break in the rhythm that I don’t want there. Other alternatives, such as ending the first sentence and beginning the next with a connective word, like “however…” or “because…” clearly wouldn’t work there. A semicolon does.
If a semicolon is a super-comma, then the super-semicolon is… uh… a colon. Colons are mainly used to end a complete sentence and introduce something else: the basic difference between this and a semicolon is that a semicolon links two complete sentences, whereas what follows a colon is dependant on what came before to make sense. Like just there, where using the word “this” makes what comes after the colon a sentence fragment without the part before the colon. If I’d instead written, “the basic difference between a colon and a semicolon…” then that would be a complete sentence and would have to be preceded by a semicolon. Confused yet? Great!
Colons are also used to introduce a list, with the list items separated by commas (e.g. the countries of the UK are: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales). However, where a comma is already in use the semicolon can once again step up as a super-comma to clarify things with an additional degree of separation. For example:
My favourite sci fi novels include: The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams; The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers; Trading in Danger, Elizabeth Moon; The Martian, Andy Weir; Earth Girl, Janet Edwards; and Leviathan’s Wake, James S.A. Corey.
(List is in no way comprehensive.)
Yes, I know; I could have used “by” instead of the commas and then commas instead of semicolons. Whatever, it’s just an example. The point is; far from being useless, the semicolon has specific uses, and gives you some flexibility in how you express yourself. It’s where the rising comma meets the falling full stop. Embrace it.
Harriet Phoenix 