Federal agencies and Wal-Mart are investigating the charges; C. J.’s Seafood did not respond to The Times’s request for comment.
In this statement, what is the effect of semicolon in the meaning and what would the change in meaning be if we used full-stop (period) instead of a semi-colon?
I would like to know a general rule for how the meaning changes, how it would affect similar sentences, etc. If you know of tutorials on this subject, I'd be most grateful.
Best Answer
There's a lovely and beautifully self-demonstrating description of how punctuation marks work stylistically in Lewis Thomas's little piece on Punctuation.
Here's the paragraph on semicolons:
"The Greek usage" in the quotation refers to the fact (discussed in a previous paragraph) that
instead of