whenever i search it up its like “erhm actuchually??! you are supposed to use a semicolon between closely related independent clauses which are not joined by a coordinating conjunction!!🤓☝”
EXCUSE ME? I ONLY KNOW LIKE 5 WORDS IN THAT SENTENCE
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Punctuation exists so that we can look at written material and understand how a speaker would use pauses in our language. All of the terms like clauses and sentences are just ways that we label speech conventions.
Say these out loud:
“I’m going to the grocery store so we’ll have buttermilk for the pancakes.”
“I’m going to the grocery store, so let me know if you think of anything we need.”
“Go ahead and watch the show without me; I’m going to the grocery store.”
“I don’t have enough time tonight to watch the show with you. I need to go to the grocery store.”
Saying them aloud, you will notice that you create pauses naturally in the same places where the punctuation is located. That’s not because you see the punctuation and know to insert a pause. It’s because you speak the language, and the language includes the pauses. The punctuation is just there so that a reader can see where the pauses go and understand how long the pauses are supposed to be.
Longer pauses indicate that you are finished with one thought and now are taking us to a connected thought. That’s why, a lot of times, you can swap out a semicolon for a period. The clauses and sentences within one paragraph are like a row of dominoes. Each domino is an individual thought. They are all affected by the thought that came before, and they push forward to affect the thought that comes afterward.
And paragraphs–units separated by the biggest pauses of all–are groupings of thoughts that work together to get one big chunk of information across. That’s like moving on to another grouping of dominoes. When you look at it on the page, there’s a big visual gap, just like the gap between groupings of dominoes, which prevents one group from tumbling into another. Commas, semicolons, and periods are the smaller gaps between dominoes within one paragraph.
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