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Semicolons 10242 Views
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Transcript
- 00:04
Semicolons, a la Shmoop. Your best friend Lila loves Disney movies.
- 00:10
Her favorite is Beauty and the Beast; she loves the part where Gaston falls off the
- 00:14
castle. Okay, she's a little grim.
- 00:16
While it's perfectly okay for you to mention Lila's favorite Disney movie, and the reason
- 00:20
why she loves the film, in two separate sentences...
Full Transcript
- 00:24
...feel free to bust out the semicolon here instead.
- 00:26
Believe it or not, the semicolon doesn't exist just so you can text a winking emoticon.
- 00:31
Nope... this punctuation mark serves to splice two shorter sentences that are closely related
- 00:38
to each other... together. Say you have a paragraph of short sentences.
- 00:43
"Mary hated her shoes. They were too small. They were also ugly. Her mom had bought them on sale."
- 00:49
Too many choppy sentences can be boring for the reader. The semicolon allows you to spice
- 00:56
up your sentence structure, so you end up with...
- 00:58
..."Mary hated her shoes. They were too small -- semicolon -- they were also ugly.
- 01:04
Her mom had bought them on sale."
- 01:06
Your reader is less bored. Yay! Now make them clown shoes and you're really in business...
- 01:14
You also use a semicolon when you want to point out the relationship between two clauses.
- 01:18
Take these two sentences: "Jane's pants were too short" and "Everyone could see
- 01:24
her hairy ankles."
- 01:26
There's a clear relationship between these two sentences. So why not string them together
- 01:30
with a semicolon?
- 01:31
Then you end up with, "Jane's pants were too short -- semicolon -- everyone could
- 01:36
see her hairy ankles." You never use semicolons with coordinating
- 01:40
conjunctions like "and", "or", and "but"...
- 01:43
...with one exception.
- 01:44
For example, say you have the sentence, "Sara has a shrine to Twilight in her room, but
- 01:49
she hides it from her friends."
- 01:51
Here, the punctuation mark between "Twilight" and "but" needs to be a comma.
- 01:56
Now for the exception. Say your sentence is, "Lots of girls have Twilight shrines, including
- 02:02
Sara in Muleshoe, Texas -- semicolon -- Leslie in Stop, Arkansas -- semicolon -- and Linda
- 02:09
in Hellhole Palms, California."
- 02:12
Because you're listing girls with Twilight shrines in this sentence...
- 02:16
...and because commas are already being used to separate cities from states...
- 02:20
...semicolons are needed to separate each girl in the list from the others.
- 02:25
One instance where you always use a semicolon is when a conjunctive adverb is in play.
- 02:31
Conjunctive adverbs include words like "however", "therefore", and "indeed".
- 02:39
Say you have two sentences: "I put off writing my paper all week"...
- 02:42
...and, "Therefore, I will be pulling an all-nighter."
- 02:46
If you want to combine these two sentences into one, you'd insert a semicolon between
- 02:50
"week" and "therefore", and end up with...
- 02:53
..."I put off writing my paper all week -- semicolon -- therefore, I will be pulling
- 02:57
an all-nighter." If you're having trouble remembering that
- 03:00
coordinating conjunctions require commas...
- 03:03
...and conjunctive adverbs need semicolons...
- 03:05
...try this trick. Coordinating conjunctions are small words like "and", "or",
- 03:10
and "but"...
- 03:11
...and they need small commas.
- 03:15
Conjunctive adverbs are bigger words like "however", "therefore", and "indeed"...
- 03:20
...and they need the bigger semicolon. Anyway... we know Lila's your bestie and
- 03:26
all, but...might we recommend you get some new friends?
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