It seems a long time since I've written anything in this blog. Sorry about that. Some months it's all I can do to keep my head above water.
Anyway, today I want to talk about something that's extremely useful and often misunderstood - the semicolon.
A semicolon is used to join two independent clauses in a sentence. What does this mean, I hear you ask. Well, an independent clause is a clause that can stand alone; it could, if necessary, be a sentence all by itself. See what I did there? That's an example of a semicolon used correctly.
The semicolon is not appropriate unless both clauses are independent. For example, consider the sentence: The dog was tall, having inordinately long legs. Here we have an independent and a subordinate clause. The main clause ('The dog was tall') forms the basic sentence, and the subordinate clause modifies, or adds information to it. Do you see how 'having extremely long legs' on its own is not a well-formed sentence? Here, 'having' is not a verb, but is used as a preposition, taking the place of 'with', and so the clause does not have a verb, and cannot be a sentence.
So, 'The dog was tall; it had inordinately long legs.' is correct, whereas
'The dog was tall; having inordinately long legs.' is not.
A further restriction exists on the use of the semicolon; the clauses linked should be related in some meaningful way. For example, 'Harry took the train to work; the love of the poets is a thing apart', although ostensibly structurally correct, is just weird, because a general statement about the love of poets is not relatable to one man's morning commute. You have a fair bit of leeway with this; there only has to be some kind of link, not necessarily a very direct one. E.G. 'Harry took the train to work; Muriel preferred to walk.' Here, the association between the two clauses is direct and obvious; we are comparing two characters' transport habits.
We could also say 'Harry took the train to work; it was a bitterly cold day.' This is okay too; here, the link is formed because in the second clause, we are talking about the weather when Harry took the train. The two clauses are logically connected, even though there is no necessary link between weather and trains.
An additional use of semicolons is to separate subsections of a complex list. For example, suppose you are telling your husband what to buy at the shops. If he's not very clever at shopping, you may want to provide some guidance about the supermarket, just so he'll be home before dark. So you group the items into the parts of the store in which they can be found, so:
Get me some low-fat milk, feta, Greek yoghourt and Mozarella from the dairy case; a big thing of Napisan and some fabric conditioner from the laundry aisle; and half a dozen packets of Schmackos for Rover.
Now if you read this sentence out loud, you should be able to hear the difference between the pauses marked by the commas and the semicolons. Note that the semicolons are not used to separate list items from each other, but to mark the end of sections in the list. Note also that this usage contravenes the rules given above for the general use of semicolons.
There now! That's pretty well all there is to it. Have a good day, be careful out there, and if you fancy a great read that will make you laugh out loud and snort coffee, pick up a copy of my new book - just released, the final volume in the Fiona MacDougall trilogy. Get it at AMAZON or SMASHWORDS.
