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Usage examples of semicolon.

Naturally, therefore, this is where the colon and semicolon waltz in together, to a big cheer from all the writers in the audience.

But sadly, anyone lazily looking for an excuse not to master the colon and semicolon can always locate a respectable reason, because so many are advanced.

The semicolon has currently fallen out of fashion with newspapers, the official reason being that readers of newsprint prefer their sentences short, their paragraphs bite-sized and their columns of type uncluttered by wormy squiggles.

The first printed semicolon was the work of good old Aldus Manutius just two years after Columbus sailed to the New World, and at the same date and place as the invention of double-entry book-keeping.

But although I still swoon every time I look at this particular semicolon from 1494, it was not, as it turns out, the first time a human being ever balanced a dot on top of a comma.

Thus the comma is the lightest mark, then the semicolon, then the colon, then the full stop.

Of the objections to the colon and semicolon listed above, there is pnly one I am prepared to concede: that semicolons are dangerously habit-forming.

But the writers rock back and forth on their office chairs, softly tapping the semicolon key and emitting low whimpers.

But the holy text of the colon and semicolon is the letter written by George Bernard Shaw to T.

In each of the examples above, a dash could certainly be substituted for the semicolon without much damage to the sentence.

But it is worth learning the different effects created by the semicolon and the dash.

With the semicolon in place, Tom locking himself in the shed and England losing to Argentina sound like two things that really got on the nerves of someone else.

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

The full stop of the editio princeps at rocks, line 547, has therefore been deleted, and a semicolon substituted for the original comma at the close of line 546.

The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semicolon, and more formality than the dash.