Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
Even as a AP English Comp student, I have never clearly understood how or why I'd use them in prose, and the need to do so has never come up.
|
There are two very common uses for semi-colons:
1. When you want to have a connection between two clauses that's more than a comma, but less than a full stop (period). Eg. I went for a walk this morning; the sun was shining. Here, the second clause is related to the first, so it wouldn't really be appropriate to make it a new sentence. Either a semi-colon or a dash is appropriate.
2. When you have a list, and the items in the list themselves contain commas, a semi-colon is generally used to separate the items.
It really is a very useful punctuation mark
.