Random Grammar Help

Let's talk about the semicolon and the pause

Okay, recently I’ve been working on a lot of people’s stories that are fantastic except for one thing—one easily fixable thing—they have semicolons everywhere.

The semicolon is that little bit of punctuation that looks like there’s a comma on the bottom and a period topping it.

Most people think they understand it. It’s a period topping a comma, right? You use it to do something or um… yeah…?

Here’s the thing, a semicolon is a divider. It’s like a comma and a period that way, but it’s not. It creates a different length of the pause for the reader between the words that it divides.

Yes! There are different levels of pause.

Here check it out. We’ll do it with three sentences.

The first is a comma, but it will be a minimal pause.

Shaun wanted to talk about naughty things, but Carrie was not going to let him do that today.

Here is that same sentiment but with a medium-weight pause.

Here is the same sentiment with the pause heavyweight fighter, the period.

Your punctuation choice controls the pacing of your paragraph and sentence and if you put 18 of them in one paragraph? You’re going to slow down the pace of your story and also make readers get crinkly noses and hate you.

Hint: You usually don’t want to make your readers hate you. But, you know? Sometimes a writer is into that. No judgement.

On a related topic (to pauses, not hate) . . .

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How do you use semicolons?

You use them to connect a certain kind of thing.

Semicolons connect two independent clauses. You know something is an independent clause if it can stand alone as its very own sentence.

It’s like using the conjunction and between two independent clauses to show they are really related.

You are not supposed to use commas to connect these things. When you do it’s called a comma splice and people act like a comma splice is Satan.

COMMA SPLICE ALERT! RED ALERT!

THIS IS WRONG:

You use semicolons to separate things in a list (Sometimes).

If you’ve got a weird list with lots of internal punctuation, then you can start that list off with a semicolon. Here’s an example.

My wife had a list of things that she wanted me to accomplish that day and it included taking out the trash; going into the basement to look at the copper pipes which, by the way, are boring to look at and are not linking; and singing—I’m a horrible singer, by the way—a whole mess of show tunes and not the ones from Hamilton for some reason.

You use semicolons for conjunctive adjective moments

These are tricky beasts, but mostly happen with these words when they join two independent clauses.

The words are:

moreover, nevertheless, however, otherwise, therefore, then, finally, likewise, and consequently. 

Here’s a quick example:

Shaun had been told that he should definitely not fart in the bed at night; however, Shaun decided that this household rule was absolutely unfair.

WRITING TIP ALL SUMMARIZED:

So there you go. Don’t put semicolons everywhere because that’s a flag to agents, editors or readers. Use them when you need to because they can really help for clarity in lists, but remember too much of a good thing is a bad thing in writing.

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WRITING EXERCISE

Go in your story or your paper or your email. Check for commas. Are some of them really meant to be semicolons? Go fix them.

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