Wednesday, February 20, 2019

The Beauty of the Semicolon

 Image result for semicolon creative commons
https://www.wm.edu/as/wrc/newresources/handouts/the-semicolon.pdf
The British call a period a "full stop," but sometimes you don't want to come to a halt at the end of an independent clause; you want to link it to the next independent clause by something more than sequentiality, and that's where the semicolon comes in. It is a signal that the thought expressed in the first independent clause is not yet complete, not truly independent; it indicates the next clause is not a new thought but a continuation and conclusion, like the second line in a couplet. Then you can use that full stop. (Steven Moore, "Of Cause and Consequence," in My Back Pages, 2017, p. 715)

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