Brief grammar post. I know that nobody (including me) gets it right 100% of the time, but there's always a lot of talk about semicolons. I was taught earlier this year that you use them to join sentences that are related, yet can stand on their own. I decided to research common mistakes made when using them and found a few tutorials and a rather useful grammar quiz.
Of course, you can never just do casual grammar research: you always end up getting into trouble or find yourself knee deep in split infinitives. Look, I try to stay away from claiming to be a grammar nazi, because I'm really not at all. I just try my best. I am putting this information out there to inform the general public.
In my opinion, the easiest way to distinguish between semicolons and regular colons is that colons are what you use when you need to say "here something is! look at this relevant point that is usually short!" and semicolons are more like "well here I am saying a few relevant things that could be in separate sentences, but I'm going to connect them with a semicolon because that makes me seem fancy". If you have another way of looking at it, I'd really like to hear. That's the easiest way for me to get my head around it though.
Please do the quizzies from that website, cause they may illuminate your grammar abilities.. or inabilities!
mmmmmmmgrammar
ReplyDeleteI use a more 'readerly' approach. I know I'm often wrong, but I think about how I'd read the text, and the appropriate pause length (short, medium, long) and colonify accordingly. In short, I use punctuation in the wrong way, but it feels like the write (haha!) way. Text is designed to be read; not thrown on a slab and autopsied. I wish that clicked earlier in life.
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