#15 Semicolon

     As an international student who learns English as a second language, I always face a lot of trouble to write articles in right grammar and usage rules. There a lot of usage rules I always mess them up and a lot of grammar rules I even don’t know. It’s annoying, huh. After the practice of punctuation last week, I found that I always use the punctuations in unsuitable way, especially semicolons.

     Before that, I always thought semicolons are just a punctuations have closely usage of periods. And I use it when I want to lengthen a sentence since two sentences connected with a semicolons is also one sentence and often add the semicolons before “and”. However, there are also several restraints of using semicolons. I google the rules of semicolons, and find several rules on grammar.com.

First rule, use a semicolon in place of a period to separate two sentences where the conjunction has been left out. Second rule, It is preferable to use a semicolon before introductory words such as however, therefore, that is, i.e., for example, e.g..Third rule, use the semicolon to separate units of a series when one or more of the units contain commas. Last, use the semicolon between two sentecces joined by a coordinating conjunction when one or more commas appear in the first sentences.

Although i still have some confused about these rules, it's still very useful to help me to use these punctuations appropriately.