Connect Two Related Thoughts with a Semicolon
(No clunky conjunction needed)
The semicolon has several standard uses, but right now I’m thinking about this one: a semicolon connects two independent clauses that are closely related.
Here’s an example from best-selling Substack author Ash Ambirge:
You don’t just wake up having opinions; these things must be formed, shaped, considered, moulded.
In copyediting, I see a lot of unjustified semicolons. Too often a semicolon occurs where a period would be more appropriate. In extreme cases, authors overuse semicolons out of an apparent fondness for long sentences.
I’m all for long sentences, as long as they’re well built. But the semicolon should not be used as an excuse to string independent clauses together like train cars.
Among high school students, I’m told, the most common semicolon problem is a tendency to use a comma in its place. Unfortunately, trying to make a comma do a semicolon’s job typically creates the kind of run-on sentence known as a “comma splice.” (I’ve always disliked the term “comma splice,” probably because it sounds like a primitive surgical procedure performed without anesthesia and under duress, such as on the battlefield or during an ill-fated jungle expedition.)
As Ellen Jovin tells a young visitor to her Grammar Table,
You use a semicolon in places where you could put a period, but where you want to make the ideas more closely related.1
I like Jovin’s emphasis on what the writer wants to accomplish. In her telling, it’s not that the sentence demands a semicolon in order to be “correct.” It’s that the writer is actively doing something, making specific choices, in order to have a particular desired effect on the reader, like a chef choosing the best utensil for the task at hand.
In contrast, William Zinsser in On Writing Well outright discouraged writers from using the semicolon. He warned that the semicolon’s “19th-century mustiness” would slow the momentum of modern prose.
But properly used, the semicolon is a remarkably flexible piece of punctuation. In this sentence from an article about the novelist Marilynne Robinson, for example, it performs a tiny, meaningful turn:
Robinson read [Louisa May] Alcott as a child, the way many American girls do; she also read “Moby-Dick,” at age nine.2
I like the semicolon’s potential for subtlety. It can help written prose get closer to the way thought works.
Just be sure the connecting semicolon doesn’t create a suggestion you didn’t intend:
A large sum of money disappeared from the office safe over the weekend; Steve will be away on vacation this week.
Ellen Jovin, Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian (Boston: Mariner Books, 2022), 160.
Casey Cep, “Marilynne Robinson’s Essential American Stories,” New Yorker (September 25, 2020).