This piece of punctuation is often over-used, when it isn’t being utilised as a winking emoji’s eyes.
You can use this punctuation mark in two ways:
1. when writing lists (though this is only when items in a list contain commas already) and
2. when writing a sentence that has two separate but loosely related parts to it, e.g.:
— I went to the supermarket and bought a free-from, vanilla-flavoured, cheesecake; a two-hundred pound, bullet-proof turkey; and a somnambulant, mouldering corpse.
— The Dark Queen is an amazing woman; she once rolled all the way down the Niagara Falls in a leaky barrel.
It is the nefarious love-child of the full-stop and the comma. More powerful than a comma (if used sparingly — with great power comes great responsibility*), and less powerful than a full-stop.
It can also be used in lists that are vertical or numbered / lettered, like so:
1. Half a pound of two-penny rice;
2. Half a pound of treacle; and
3. Don’t forget to pick up the dry-cleaning.
Or:
There are three things a man needs in life: A) a flat where he can leave his clothes all over the floor; B) a shed full of tools he doesn’t know how to use; C) a Spider-Man onesie.
DON’T USE SEMI-COLONS BETWEEN DEPENDENT CLAUSES (that is, parts of a sentence that completely rely on each other to provide the sentence’s meaning), and DON’T USE THEM BETWEEN INDEPENDENT CLAUSES THAT ARE UNRELATED.
Semi-colons should come after a full-stop that denotes an abbreviation, and outside of the quotation marks if you are quoting something:
— Customer support is available every February the 30th, 31st, and 32nd; every Blue Moon between 1a.m. and 4a.m.; and every Bank Holiday Thursday from 7 p.m to 12a.m.
— She said she’s been “cooking the books”; what the books are about, however, is now unclear.
*and big gas bills.
Hopefully this has been helpful to some of you writerly folks. Over and out.
Nightwalks 