One of my British friends, while looking over one of my works, commented that I use semicolons quite a bit (it’s true; I do) and that he rarely encountered them in British work. I’m not sure whether semicolons are less common in British English overall or if that was just his experience, but I have heard people express confusion about semicolons many times, so I thought it would be worth a blog post, at least.
Grammarly has a pretty good rundown of semicolons vs colons vs dashes (and even taught me something about en-dashes that I didn’t know), but I’m going to focus just on semicolons and how I use them here. But I’m going to start by talking about paragraphs.
People focus on sentences a lot while talking about the nuts and bolts of writing. Creating a clear, readable sentence is a valuable skill; creating a lot of them while varying the structure to keep them from being boring is a different but equally valuable skill. Writing a good paragraph isn’t always something you’ll read about in craft books, but it’s also an important skill. A paragraph should consist of sentences related more to each other than they are to the ones in the preceding or following paragraph. The point at which you should start a new paragraph? That’s for the writer to determine.
For example, I could have broken the previous paragraph apart like so:
People focus on sentences a lot while talking about the nuts and bolts of writing. Creating a clear, readable sentence is a valuable skill; creating a lot of them while varying the structure to keep them from being boring is a different but equally valuable skill.
Writing a good paragraph isn’t always something you’ll read about in craft books, but it’s also an important skill. A paragraph should consist of sentences related more to each other than they are to the ones in the preceding or following paragraph. The point at which you should start a new paragraph? That’s for the writer to determine.
The judgment call there is whether the “sentences” part of the paragraph stands on its own or is part of the “paragraphs” part. What the paragraph break does is tell the reader “pause, now we’re moving on to something different.” Because I set this whole paragraph up with the idea that we were going to talk about paragraphs, I think the “sentences” part is related enough that I would probably lean toward leaving it as one paragraph. But hopefully you can see where the spacing makes you read it somewhat differently.
Semicolons work a little bit like that. The period at the end of a sentence says “we’re done with that idea, now here’s something different.” A semicolon says “we’re done with that idea, but don’t let it go just yet: here’s something else that goes along with it.” The two clauses separated by a semicolon in this usage should always be independent clauses, meaning that you should be able to substitute a period for a semicolon and the grammar would remain correct. Look at the example in my paragraph about writing, above:
Creating a clear, readable sentence is a valuable skill; creating a lot of them while varying the structure to keep them from being boring is a different but equally valuable skill.
I could also have written that as:
Creating a clear, readable sentence is a valuable skill. Creating a lot of them while varying the structure to keep them from being boring is a different but equally valuable skill.
That works too, right? Maybe you even prefer it. I like them joined by a semicolon because the paragraph starts with “People focus on sentences a lot” and I think that all the thoughts about sentences go together. The point of the paragraph isn’t all the sentence skills, so I can put them together in one sentence and then we’re done with that.
Semicolons also help vary sentence length and structure. You don’t want your prose to be full of the same type of sentence, because that get repetitive enough to throw a reader out of the work. Find a place where you have two closely-related sentences and see if a semicolon can’t give your prose some variety.
There are other use cases for semicolons, like separating out items in a list when the items include commas, like cities and states: Mobile, Alabama; Lexington, Kentucky; Eureka, California. But the one that seems to confuse people most is when it joins two independent clauses. I hope the above has helped demystify the semicolon, if you were confused about it; if you weren’t, I hope it’s helped you think about how to use it.
Thanks, Kyell. Good explanation. Have to say, I've found that the semicolon is dangerously easy to fall in love with: it's just such an elegant and flexible punctuation mark. These days I find myself editing semicolons *out* of my early drafts rather than putting them *in*, fearful they'll become just one more annoying mannerism.