Semicolon

;

A semicolon, as its appearance suggests, it is half way between a full stop and a comma. Use it when you write two separate sentences, know they are separate and should have a full stop, but you'd like to keep them very closely linked. For example:

"In the 1960s, the USA was the world's strongest nuclear power; the USSR was not far behind."

"South Korea is a democratic country with independent political parties; North Korea is a one-party (communist) state."

A semicolon can also be used as a separator in lists of longer items. Usually items in a list are separated by commas. When we make a shopping list, for example, short items (simple names) are separated by commas: milk, butter, eggs, tea, brown sugar etc. In academic writing, however, the items may be quite long. For example:

"Among the most important causes of the Second World War were: the growing desire, and indeed policy, of Hitler for increased lebensraum for the German people; the growing fear and distrust of the democratic states for this and other manifestations of Fascism; and the sympathy of the democratic nations for the plight of helpless countries in the centre of Europe."

Each of the 'causes' mentioned above is so long that the three of them together need the semicolon to make them easier to read. The semicolon shows the structure of the sentence to the reader. Each cause could be dealt with in a sentence of its own.

Suggestion: if you find punctuation getting out of control, try to break your thoughts into separate sentences. On the other hand, one way of sounding academic is to write in long sentences. So if you feel in control, keep your thoughts together.

There is more detail, and in particular guidance on the difference between a semicolon and a colon, at More sophisticated punctuation.