semicolons are commonly usedf in "not only" statements, indicating connection of ideas without unnecessary prepositions or conjunctions. Can you give an example of what you mean by this?

Thanks, everyone. According to The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style: With other punctuation Put commas and periods inside closing quotation marks; put colons and semicolons outside. Other punctuation, such as exclamation

Jingtian, The New York Times style book says: periods and commas, in American usage, always go inside the closing quotation marks, regardless of grammatical logic. Another source gives this example: ...two complete thoughts joined by

Semi-colon is always a problem for many people including natives. The ways I understand it is, if two ideas are expressed in separte senteces which are conceptually connected, a semi-colon can be used. The next question I have is, can this be

A better rule would be "If your sentence has become so confused with commas that another form of punctuation is needed to replace at least one of the commas, then the sentence needs to be re-written." I agree. For

A better rule would be "If your sentence has become so confused with commas that another form of punctuation is needed to replace at least one of the commas, then the sentence needs to be re-written."

Semi-colon is always a problem for many people including natives. The ways I understand it is, if two ideas are expressed in separte senteces which are conceptually connected, a semi-colon can be used. The next question I have is, can this be

But I do wonder if this follows the idea that a semicolon can take the place of a comma if a comma has already been used in the sentence. I'm not familiar with this rule. It seems to me much too mechanical to be a useful way to think about

According to Marx, not only do religions pacify people falsely; they may themselves become tools of oppression. At first sight I would say that this is wrong, but after reading Clive's post, I would not swear to it. I have always thought that

Hi, Welcome to the Forum. I'm struggling with the proper usage of the semicolon. Below are a couple variations of a thought. Which is correct? 1) 2pm is perfect! I’ll fly in Friday morning for the meeting; So 2pm will give me plenty of time