Semicolons

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this fancy piece of punctuation, this is a semicolon ( ; ). It's that thing that looks like a colon, but has a comma on the bottom. Yes, complicated, I know; or is it?

Semicolons are really easy to use and help keep the flow of information nice; not to mention, if you use one, you'll impress people who don't know what they are. They'll think you're Shakespeare or something.

You can use a semicolon to replace the words and, but, yet, or, and any other word that joins two sentences together, but you can't put them just anywhere. You must first make sure that the two sentences you're trying to combine are both full sentences; then you must make sure that they both are regarding similar topics. Here are some examples:

The dog likes to play fetch; the sky is blue.

These sentences can not be combined because they aren't about the same thing. The ideas are too different.

The dog likes to play fetch; he'll play for hours.

These sentences can be combined because they are both about the dog playing fetch. Hope this helps!