The semicolon is a really powerful punctuation mark. If you get it right you will impress those reading your work as well as being able to express your ideas and opinions in a more subtle way.
The semicolon is pretty easy to figure out once it has been explained. Here are a couple of situations where the semicolon is used
In lists where the items themselves have commas.
The semicolon is used to clarify a complicated list containing many items, many of which contain commas themselves. Have a look at this example:
School dinner for today is a choice between fish, chips, peas, sausage, egg, beans, sauté potatoes, beef pie, mashed potatoes, mushy peas, gravy, pasta, garlic bread, salad.
You can probably work out what each individual option is if you sit down and think about it but using semicolons to separate the choices does the job really well: Continue reading “How do I use semicolons?”