Monday, February 5, 2007

Semicolons

I was wondering the same thing about copyediting poems as Chi. I'm interested to see the response to her question. Since I have to think of another question, I'll use this to bring up semicolons. Pat passed out the "Punctuation Pattern Sheet," about clauses. If a semicolon only goes between two independent clauses, why not just use a period? (Instead of, "John washed his car; he waxed it, too." Couldn't one also write, "John washed his car. He waxed it, too.")

1 comment:

Pat said...

Yes, I brought that up when we talked about the use of the semicolon in that sentence. At the time, I said that an author may choose to use a semicolon if the independent clauses are intimately related. The example has no context, but we can assume that the semicolon was used for that purpose.