I've decided to postpone the final part to the Mike Ireland Big Three, as it's actually an extremely detail-oriented kind of thing that would serve a better purpose at a later time. At present I'm sure people would be far more interested with a simpler, more immediately-useful bit of information first, so I'll do that instead...
The Joys of Semicolons:
For those of you who've read a lot of my stuff, you've probably noticed I use a lot of semicolons in my writing. What can I say, they're pretty much my most favourite piece of punctuation (an extremely geeky thing to say, I know). I find them extremely useful, though; they can really add variety to a piece of writing, making it at least seem a bit fancier and stuff.
As kind of a mid-point between commas and periods, they're exactly what you'd imagine they'd be. They're "light periods" where two ideas can still be connected fairly nicely without a full-stop period; or, they're "super commas" that can lend a stronger pause in the language or break up a series of ideas that already involve commas (more on this in a bit).
They're easy as heck to implement, too, so let's just get into it!
Semicolons as Super Commas:
Sometimes you want a longer beat than what a comma gives in the language for effect. So bam, you can use the semicolon to do that:
Rambo shot the man with a machine-gun, and the man exploded!
Rambo shot the man with a machine-gun; the man exploded!
Simple, huh? Now, there is one little grammar thingy involving that "and" in there, but I'll cover that below.
The other main "super comma" use of a semicolon is for listing longer sets of things. You know, when you say something like... "On my camping trip I took: a sleeping bag, a pillow, and a crate of instant noodles." Say the listed things are a little more elaborate?
The Spartans had several factors leading to their success as a nation-state: young, healthy boys were trained from a young age to only be soldiers; they had a unique dual-king system where only one king would ever go out on campaign, never leaving them without a living leader at any given time; they had enslaved an entire group of people, the helots, to do all the menial work.
Could you do that just as easily with commas? With a few modifications, sure. But you notice how all the listed bits in that "Sparta" thing already have commas within them? Sometimes when you have commas already a part of the listed things (say, for example, if you were listing off cities with commas between the city name and the state/province name), having all those extra commas can cause confusion or just flat-out look ugly. So bam, hit up the semicolons.
See? Easy.
Semicolons as Light Periods:
This is by far the easiest (and often most effective) way to use semicolons.
Just so everyone's in the right mindset, I'm going to show a list of examples, all of which more or less say the same thing and are grammatically correct:
- She punched the baby in the face. Not surprisingly, the baby cried.
- She punched the baby in the face and, not surprisingly, the baby cried.
- She punched the baby in the face; not surprisingly, the baby cried.
Like I already mentioned, the above three examples are all grammatically correct. The only difference is in the way they read/flow.
The first one uses a period between the two clauses - a full stop.
"She punched the baby in the face (PERIOD, wait). Not surprisingly, the baby cried."
The second one uses the connecting word "and" to join the two clauses, connecting the two into a single longer sentence; this makes the whole thing read a lot faster and perhaps stylistically puts the crying reaction a lot closer to the punching action.
The third one uses a semicolon to break up the two clauses. It reads about the same as the first example with the period, but the softer break makes the two sides feel a little more connected, a little more in touch with each other. It's a subtle stylistic thing, but people can feel it (even if it's not a conscious thing).
The Main Thing For Which To Watch:
When doing these sorts of workshops, I'm always worried that I'm using linguistic terms that people don't understand. Just checking: does everyone know what I mean when I say "clause"?
The short version: a clause is a group of words that makes for a full sentence; that is, it has a subject noun and then something that fully describes the noun with a verb and anything else needed to make the verb work (called the "predicate"). So in the clause "She punched the baby", "She" is the subject and "punched the baby" is the predicate. Together, they make a full clause.
The even shorter version: If you write a clause and end it with a period, it works as a grammatically correct full sentence.
Now that we all know what a clause is, I'll finally make my point.
The main important thing to keep in mind is that a semicolon used in this manner requires complete clauses on either side of the semicolon. Let's get away from baby-punching for a moment to give a new example now; which of the examples below is correct?
I shot the poor bastard in the head; now dead.
or,
I shot the poor bastard in the head; now he's dead.
or,
I shot the poor bastard in the head; and now he's dead.
So which was correct? If you said the second one, you have this stuff pretty well figured out!
In the first example, the right side of the semicolon, "now dead", is not a full clause (it's missing both a subject and a verb!). The second example, in contrast, has full clauses on both sides of the semicolon.
So how about the third? Well... that "and" word in there messes things up. "And" is a coordinating conjunction that also connects two clauses; in effect, it's redundant to the sentence. More often than not, semicolons can be used as replacements for conjunctions like "and" or "but".
So one last time, to show the difference between semicolons and "and":
I shoot the poor bastard in the head; now he's dead.
I shoot the poor bastard in the head and now he's dead.
So that's semicolons.
Why We Care About This:
I've probably just shown through all those comparative examples that semicolons are almost completely optional in writing; most things semicolons can do, other kinds of punctuation can also do with some little tweaks. So why use them?
You use them 'cause they're so damn stylish.
It pretty much all comes back to what it literally is: a mix between a comma and a period. If you were to read a work out loud with punctuation in mind, you would take a long pause and a breath at every period and a short pause (and breath) at every comma. And y'know... sometimes you wanna have the option of a "medium pause" that semicolons can give. Maybe it sets the pace of a story better, maybe it sets up a related point in an essay better than a full-stop period.
It's a tool. Just as a regular dinner knife can do everything from cut meat, spread butter and sweep grains of rice onto a knife, we still have butter knives and steak knives for when the situation really recommends them.
So yes, that's semicolons and why you should use them; it's my hope that you'll all think about using them a little more in your next works.
(Any questions? Comments? Concerns? Tell us here and we will do what we can to help!)
