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The semicolon is commonly used as parts of emoticons, in order to indicate winking or crying, as in ;) and ;_;. Project Semicolon is the name of an anti-suicide initiative (since the semicolon continues a sentence rather than ending it) which has led to the punctuation mark becoming a highly symbolic and popular tattoo (most commonly done on ...
Comma splices are rare in most published writing, [6] but are common among inexperienced writers of English. [1] [7]The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White advises using a semicolon, not a comma, to join two grammatically complete clauses, or writing the clauses as separate sentences.
The comma's use is consistent with the conventional practice of the region. [28] It can resolve ambiguity (see examples below). [29] [30] [31] Its use is consistent with other means of separating items in a list (for example, when semicolons are used to separate items, one is always included before the last item). [32]
In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point · , known as the ano teleia (άνω τελεία). In Georgian, three dots ჻ were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It is still sometimes used in calligraphy.
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
Arthur said, "The situation is deplorable." (The full sentence is quoted; the period is part of the quotation.) Arthur said that the situation "was the most deplorable he had seen in years." (Although the full sentence is not quoted, the sense of finality conveyed by the period is part of the quotation.)
It was adopted by Church Slavonic and eventually settled on a form essentially similar to the Latin semicolon. In Unicode, it is separately encoded as U+037E ; GREEK QUESTION MARK, but the similarity is so great that the code point is normalised to U+003B ; SEMICOLON, making the marks identical in practice. [19]
A conjunction may be placed at the beginning of a sentence, [1] but some superstition about the practice persists. [2] The definition may be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit and perform the same function, e.g. "as well as", "provided that".