As much as I love being a grammar Nazi and catching the little mistakes before they get shipped out and published, there's one recurring thing that I've developed an involuntary twitch against.

;

The semicolon is a nifty little punctuation mark that looks like a period on top of a comma. Cute little guy, isn't he? When two sentences revolve around the same idea, the semicolon can join the two thoughts at the cost of the second sentence's first capitalized letter (unless that word is a proper name).

However, it should be noted that the semicolon ought to be used sparingly, lest the writer looks lazy in the process. Additionally, it is not meant to join an incomplete thought to the complete thought in front of it. Take a good, long look at the second sentence before applying the semicolon. If the thought can't stand on its own, then a semicolon cannot act as the duct tape for all your punctuational needs.

Furthermore, the exception exists in which a semicolon can separate items of a list if and only if the sentence would otherwise have too many confusing commas. The number of commas that make such a sentence confusing is up to the author/reader's discretion. I haven't seen this yet, but it is a good tidbit to store in the back of your mind for future reference.

Are you finished, Tundra?

*sigh* Yeah, I'm done.

Good, because I think you have something else that you need to follow such a rant.

Right. I apologize if this came across as mean or ill-intentioned.

Heh, yeah I've not given it nearly as much thought prior to writing this story, as after seeing your remarks about it.

For the record, prior to writing this story, my assumption was that you use a semicolon after a complete thought - regardless of what follows.

I think it appears in my story a lot for a few reasons. First, I dislike making a long string of short complete sentences. I don't like writing "beige prose" unless it's a very tense moment for the characters. So what ends up happening is my sentences tend to accumulate lots of commas. But I dislike run-on sentences too. Breaking them up with semicolons seems to make sense, especially if there is a particular comma which feels like it is farther up in the hierarchy within the sentence than the rest of the commas.

I'll also sometimes clip out commas if they are at the lowest hierarchy. Like when pairing pairs of items together. One might say A, and B but iirc using a comma before 'and' is wrong when describing a pair anyway? So a pair of pairs may read A and B, and C and D. Whereas if I left the commas completely out of that, it would be completely ambiguous what the pairings were and may as well omit the ands: A, B, C and D.

So sometimes a semicolon works it's way in there if there happens to be a "complete thought"on either side. Then I might end up with A, B; C, D if segments A and B form a complete thought as well as segments C and D.

In terms of avoiding overuse, well, the alternative would be to have ambiguous comma use in long sentences. Or - make a habit of writing shorter sentences and just separate the clauses with a period.

One thing I've tried very hard to avoid at least is using multiple semicolons in the same sentence. It feels wrong to do that, although I'm not sure if it's technically wrong or not. I also (usually) try to avoid using semicolons in consecutive sentences, because that feels more like overuse.

It's a delicate matter, to be sure.

Looking over your recent edits to Chapters 3 and 4 I definitely appreciate the final polish being put on those chapters, which I had assumed was pretty much done. It's strange how you can read a chapter over and over and think it's all finished, only to have someone point out errors that got missed.