Semicolons bring the drama; that’s why I love them
Anjana Ahuja, writing for the FT:
Forget the haters and doubters; this under-appreciated punctuation mark is a writer’s friend, beloved of Charles Dickens, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. The semicolon — a comma with a full stop for a hat, and sometimes called a super-comma — can sashay into prose and transform it in a way that a full stop, comma or even a dash cannot.
I often see people use a comma where I would have used a semicolon (or indeed a full stop). They create a run-on sentence in the process (apparently called a ‘comma splice’).
As per a commenter below the FT article: ‘A rule to keep in mind: use a comma to separate a dependent clause; if you use a semi colon, the phrase on either side of the semicolon should work as a standalone sentence.’
My own favourite punctuation mark is the colon. Orwell makes interesting use of it. The fact that I don’t totally understand the thinking behind how it’s deployed in, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is why I find it interesting. (See also this brief essay on Orwell’s punctuation.)