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Semicolons, a la Shmoop. Your best friend Lila loves Disney movies.

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Her favorite is Beauty and the Beast; she loves the part where Gaston falls off the

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castle. Okay, she's a little grim.

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While it's perfectly okay for you to mention Lila's favorite Disney movie, and the reason

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why she loves the film, in two separate sentences...

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...feel free to bust out the semicolon here instead.

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Believe it or not, the semicolon doesn't exist just so you can text a winking emoticon.

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Nope... this punctuation mark serves to splice two shorter sentences that are closely related

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to each other... together. Say you have a paragraph of short sentences.

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"Mary hated her shoes. They were too small. They were also ugly. Her mom had bought them on sale."

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Too many choppy sentences can be boring for the reader. The semicolon allows you to spice

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up your sentence structure, so you end up with...

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..."Mary hated her shoes. They were too small -- semicolon -- they were also ugly.

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Her mom had bought them on sale."

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Your reader is less bored. Yay! Now make them clown shoes and you're really in business...

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You also use a semicolon when you want to point out the relationship between two clauses.

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Take these two sentences: "Jane's pants were too short" and "Everyone could see

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her hairy ankles."

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There's a clear relationship between these two sentences. So why not string them together

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with a semicolon?

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Then you end up with, "Jane's pants were too short -- semicolon -- everyone could

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see her hairy ankles." You never use semicolons with coordinating

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conjunctions like "and", "or", and "but"...

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...with one exception.

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For example, say you have the sentence, "Sara has a shrine to Twilight in her room, but

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she hides it from her friends."

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Here, the punctuation mark between "Twilight" and "but" needs to be a comma.

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Now for the exception. Say your sentence is, "Lots of girls have Twilight shrines, including

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Sara in Muleshoe, Texas -- semicolon -- Leslie in Stop, Arkansas -- semicolon -- and Linda

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in Hellhole Palms, California."

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Because you're listing girls with Twilight shrines in this sentence...

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...and because commas are already being used to separate cities from states...

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...semicolons are needed to separate each girl in the list from the others.

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One instance where you always use a semicolon is when a conjunctive adverb is in play.

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Conjunctive adverbs include words like "however", "therefore", and "indeed".

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Say you have two sentences: "I put off writing my paper all week"...

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...and, "Therefore, I will be pulling an all-nighter."

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If you want to combine these two sentences into one, you'd insert a semicolon between

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"week" and "therefore", and end up with...

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..."I put off writing my paper all week -- semicolon -- therefore, I will be pulling

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an all-nighter." If you're having trouble remembering that

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coordinating conjunctions require commas...

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...and conjunctive adverbs need semicolons...

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...try this trick. Coordinating conjunctions are small words like "and", "or",

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and "but"...

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...and they need small commas.

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Conjunctive adverbs are bigger words like "however", "therefore", and "indeed"...

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...and they need the bigger semicolon. Anyway... we know Lila's your bestie and

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all, but...might we recommend you get some new friends?

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