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Bruggs ate toasted walnuts; he got sick.2. You can simplify series:
Bruggs ate toasted walnuts; he got sick; he died after three weeks of severe stomach cramps.
Turnbull liked big, green, Granny Smith apples; smallish, greenish Florida oranges; and toasted, disease-free black walnuts.3. You can connect two or more sentences with a semicolon plus a conjunctive adverb:
Surpitude liked to eat toasted, disease-free black walnuts; however, they always made her sick.
Brunswik always got sick when she ate any walnuts; consequently, she ate no nuts of any kind without bleaching them first in Clorox.
4. Sometimes when you connect related sentences, you can omit words (if your reader can fill them in from the context). Suppose you join two sentences with a semicolon:
Jill ate bleached English walnuts; Mary ate acorns.You can sometimes delete things from the second half if your reader can replace what you've deleted:
Jill ate bleached English walnuts; Mary acorns.Be careful, though. Suppose you wanted to delete words from this sentence:
Jill ate bleached English walnuts; Mary ate bleached acorns.You can't just delete "ate" from the second part:
Jill ate bleached English walnuts; Mary bleached acorns.Here it looks like Mary bleached acorns rather than ate bleached acorns. To do this more clearly, you'd have to mess around a bit:
Jill ate bleached English walnuts; Mary acorns bleached with Clorox.5. Sometimes you can combine two sentences with a semicolon and "and," "but" and "or."
Benton lost his box of walnuts; and that was probably all right.[Here, the semicolon plus "and" is supposed to emphasize the second half of the sentence.]
Would you like to see a few examples? Would you like to see Herman Melville's semicolons in Moby Dick?