21 Semicolons and Colons

The Semicolon: It’s Not Scary, I Promise

People are afraid of semicolons. It’s true! They’re so afraid of semicolons, in fact, that they use commas instead of semicolons sometimes, creating those nasty comma splices we learned about in a previous chapter.

I don’t think we should be afraid of semicolons because they’re very easy to use. If you can use a period, you can use a semicolon because 99% of the time, they belong in the same place.

The formal way to describe the main function of a semicolon is this: semicolons connect multiple independent clauses (ICs) into one sentence. It looks like this:

Morton fell down in the hallway; he had slipped on some water.
                   IC#1                                                IC #2

Now, these two ICs could have been separate sentences if the writer chose to use a period instead. They could have written

Morton fell down in the hallway. He had slipped on some water.

That’s totally fine. But this writer saw these two ideas and thought, “I want the reader to read them both close together, so they see how the two ideas are related. So what I’m going to do is replace the period at the end of the first sentence with a semicolon. Now it’s all part of one sentence.”^[1]

People run into trouble with semicolons when they try to use them as commas, so let me leave you with this piece of advice that is true in all cases except the very specific scenario discussed in the next section of this chapter:

So that’s how semicolons are used. If you have two sentences (ICs) and you want to combine them into one sentence, just replace the period separating the sentences with a semicolon. That’s it.

Almost.

Semicolons in Complicated Lists

In the previous chapter on commas we learned that commas are placed between items in a list, and this is generally true. However, sometimes the items themselves have commas in them, and that situation can cause problems. For example, let’s examine a list of places I’ve lived in my life. Place names are written like this: City, Province/State, [Country].^[2] If I were to name the city I grew up in, I would write Sarnia, Ontario. 

I’ve lived in two different countries – Australia and Canada. Here’s the list of places I’ve lived.

I’ve lived in Sarnia, Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Wollongong, New South Wales, Melbourne, Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, and New Hamburg, Ontario.

Read that list. When you’re ready, guess how many places I’ve lived and click below to reveal the correct answer.

If you found the list difficult to navigate and/or you guessed incorrectly, you’re not alone! That list was a total mess because of all the commas. I couldn’t tell which commas were part of an item and which ones were separating the items.

We can clarify the list using semicolons. When the items in a list have commas in them, use semicolons between the items to make things clearer, like this.

I’ve lived in Sarnia, Ontario; Toronto, Ontario; Wollongong, New South Wales; Melbourne, Victoria; Victoria, British Columbia; and New Hamburg, Ontario.

Colons: They Introduce Things

The colon is another intimidating piece of punctuation with very few uses. You shouldn’t be afraid of colons, though; they’re really easy to use, and they don’t have too many uses to remember.

As the heading above indicates, colons introduce things: quotations and lists, usually. Here are some examples:

Katya spoke up in class: “I don’t think that quiz was fair.”

The team brought all its equipment: racquets, tennis balls, and towels.

There’s one food I love more than anything else: fried scallops.

Take a moment to read each of those sentences. Do you feel a bit of a stop or pause when you reach the colon? I hope so — that is their desired effect. The colon is placed right before the quotation, list, or example so the reader recognizes that one of those things is about to start.

When you use colons to introduce things in a sentence, what you need to remember is this: colons are placed only at the end of a full sentence. Or, put differently, the statement that comes before the colon needs to be a full sentence.

So this following placement of a colon is incorrect.

When my family travels to Florida we all: pack our bags, load up the car, and take turns driving.

We can’t place a colon there because “When my family travels to Florida we all” isn’t a full sentence.

So, if this colon is wrong, what are your options?

1. Get rid of the colon! Although you can introduce lists and quotations with colons, you don’t have to. The sentence above would be correct if you removed the colon.
2. Rephrase the introduction so it’s a full sentence:

My family members all do three things when we travel to Florida: pack our bags, load up the car, and take turns driving.

And that’s pretty much all you need to know about colons, apart from one last usage which you’ll encounter more as a reader than a writer.

Colons Mark Subtitles

Sometimes writers (particularly those writing academic texts like scholarly articles and books) like to add subtitles to their titles, usually to provide a little more explanation or description of the text.

Here are a few examples:

• NHL’s Overtime Winner: Employment Law Protects Arena Employees
• Getting High to Feel Happy: How Mountain Climbing Cured My Depression
• “Everybody Knows”: An Examination of Paranoia in Leonard Cohen Song Lyrics

In each case, the colon marks the place where the title ends and the subtitle begins.