Point 7: Semicolon Usage

Use a semicolon to join independent clauses.

Numbers six and seven go together. You can remember them both by remembering that a comma cannot join independent clauses on its own. It needs help. The help can come from an extra dot, forming a semicolon, or from a conjunction. Either one signals your reader that an independent clause will follow.

Example A: Barry Bonds has hit 73 home runs in one season; no other Major League baseball player has ever matched that total.

Example B: Venus Williams has accomplished a great deal in tennis, but her sister might achieve even more.

The first form also applies to sentences with transitional words such as "however." You could write, for example, "Professor Simpson seemed like a decent guy at first; however, when we read his thirty-point inspection, we saw his capacity for extraordinary cruelty."