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Originally Posted by JSWolf
A semicolon can be replaced with a coma or a period in most cases and the phrasing/meaning would still be correct.
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What you're describing is a classic
comma splice. It's an error which is nearly always cited by English teachers in the course (as it were) of instructing students in the art of the semicolon.
Modern/colloquial styles of writing
do use comma splices and run-on sentences, but context determines the style, just as it does when detective fiction writers over-punctuate dependent clauses with full stops. To emphasize noir's exaggerated style, seasoned novelists like Jim Thompson and David Goodis routinely employed mannerisms that would be marked as incorrect in middle school. They also knew exactly what they were doing.
The point is this: a formal business letter should never use splices, run-on sentences or fragments, nor should, for that matter, an entry in an encyclopedia.
In editing informal journalistic pieces, I've even encountered hierarchies of comma splices -- those which are permitted (usually in parallel constructions) and those which immediately sound distasteful and disorganized.
A good writer with an original approach to style will often create their own sense of logic and consistency. This can affect not only punctuation but also syntax. Even the L'Académie française has had to allow exceptions for practices they'd normally dismiss as bad because writers like Proust employed them with such discrimination.
Here's a comma splice which many readers would find permissible: "The film was not merely unentertaining, it was an ordeal." We hear that and supply the *not only/but also* construction.
We would not, however, hear any implied structure in this:
"I wanted a pint of Gasoline Helmet Commemorative Ale, the bartender over there gave me side-eye and said 'We don't have any,' that's why I came in here with my jaw hanging, this place is the Baskin-Robbins of taps."
Most of us would say that the above sentence (really four sentences) is bad. But if you're reading a book by Hubert Selby and suddenly find yourself on a descending escalator of commas in place of periods, it just means the story is reaching its denouement and Selby is pitching waterfalls of commas and/or conjunctions to indicate a breathless succession of events.
Here's a quote from
Last Exit to Brooklyn. Note that Selby leaves out quotation marks, too, because he doesn't want them breaking up the flow.
Bennie's in lower case, of course, because it isn't being used as a name.
Quote:
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They made a small pot of bouillon and danced around it dropping tablets in and chanting, bennie in the bouillon, bennie in the bouillon, whirling away the fear and boredom, giggling, popping bennie, drinking gin, toasting Georgette: Long Live THE QUEEN.
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Ideally, we ought to learn how to write in all such modes. It's the stylistic equivalent of being a polyglot.