The semicolon is amongst the youngest of the punctuation marks. It was introduced in Venice in 1494. In comparison to the full stop, which was invented in the 3rd Century BC, it is practically a baby.

Semicolons are often used to join parts of a sentence together to establish variety and link related ideas. Unlike a colon, which separates an independent clause from descriptive information, a ...

(He wrote "Crisis Management by Apology: Corporate Response to Allegations of Wrongdoing.") A semicolon has two general uses: to clarify a series and to indicate two closely related sentences.

The most common way to use a semicolon is to help join closely connected ideas in a sentence. These sections must be independent and complete sentences, but closely linked in some way ...