A semicolon is a kind of punctuation mark that lets you pause more than a comma, but
less than a period. It’s usually used to link two or more ideas in a sentence. But
these ideas need to be able to stand on their own. We call them independent clauses for
I enjoy visiting New York; I love living in London.
If we wanted to, we could make these independent clauses into separate sentences:
I enjoy visiting New York. (period) I love living in London. (period). Both of those
sentences can stand on their own. But when we join them together with a semicolon, we
can better feel how the two ideas are linked.
There are two ways you can join together sentences. You can use a coordinating conjunction:
and,or, nor, but, yet, so… OR you can use a semicolon. Note that if your
second sentence begins with an adverb like “however,” “thus,” or “therefore,”
you SHOULD use a semicolon if you want to join the two sentences together.
”I like New York; however, I always feel like a tourist there.” If you try to use a comma instead,
you’ll wind up with a “comma-splice.” And if you leave out the punctuation altogether,
you get a run-on sentence. Both of those are very uncomfortable for the reader.
Herman Melville opens "Moby Dick" with liberal use of the semicolon:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly
November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,
and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get
such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from
deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then,
I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Melville could have written this using periods, but it would have felt quite staccato and
choppy. Or, he could have used commas, but that would speed up the pace and wouldn’t
allow the impact of each clause to sink in. The semicolons help us, as readers, to feel
how these descriptive clauses sum together so we can understand the
There’s another use of this punctuation mark that has nothing to do with joining
sentences together. Semicolons can be used to separate items in a list,
especially if the items in the list contain commas.
We sometimes call this use a “supercomma.” For example:
We offer striped ties in red,white, and blue; green, yellow, and brown; or
The company opened offices in Los Angeles, California; Seattle, Washington; and
If your writing only consists of very short sentences, consider using the semicolon. It
can help your writing be more fluid and your ideas more connected. In the words of Abraham
Lincoln, “With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me,
it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have great respect for the semi-colon; it’s