Punctuation Station (Misused punctuation)

Punctuation can make or break what you're trying to say in writing. It serves the purpose of incorporating "breaths" into sentences by breaking up the sentence a bit. Periods, exclamation points and question marks are the easiest punctuation to figure out. They go at the end of a sentence. Easy peasy.

Punctuation that goes inside the sentence can be more difficult, though. Commas and semicolons also provide a pause in sentences, but without creating a complete rest. Such punctuation is extremely important for setting off parts of a sentence from each other.

One of the best examples of this is the comparison between the sentences "Let's eat Grandma," and "Let's eat, Grandma." An itty bitty comma makes the two sentences have drastically different meanings.

Semicolons are the middle ground between periods and commas. They indicate a longer break than a comma, but not the full stop of a period. Semicolons are particularly useful in connecting independent clauses. Sometimes, though, semicolons are overused.

Take a look:

Trump and other critics said the long form contained information Obama wanted to hide; in fact, both pages of the long form contains essentially the same information; the difference is that one page includes signatures by Obama's mother and an attending physician.

This snippet from a USA Today story titled "Obama releases his Hawaii birth certificate" uses not one, but two semicolons within one chunk of the writing.

In this case, the semicolons don't add much to the overall function of the writing. The clauses would have had the same meaning if written as individual sentences. And the doubling up of semicolons makes the phrase feel cluttered.

A better way to approach this would be:

Trump and other critics said the long form contained information Obama wanted to hide when, in fact, both pages of the long form contains essentially the same information. The difference is that one page includes signatures by Obama's mother and an attending physician.

 Written as such, we get two cohesive sentences instead of just a clump of words. Making the part about the page of signatures a separate sentence also makes that bit of writing stronger that it was when set off by a semicolon.




Jackson, David. "Obama releases his Hawaii birth certificate." USA Today. http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/04/obama-releases-birth-records/1?csp=hf. 27 April 2011.