I often see people making sentences quite longer than I'm comfortable with, such as like this:
The dog ran, the dog fell, the dog dwelled; the dog didn't wish to be a part of such a place in his life; however, the dog did do his deed and carried on.
That is how I witness people with semicolons, and they're always making sentences longer and longer this way. It's wrong, isn't it? A semicolon used is to include a separate clause that does not stand well in a sentence of its own, yes?
If so, that example sentence above should be phrased as:
The dog ran, the dog fell, the dog dwelled. The dog didn't wish to be a part of such a place in his life; however, the dog did do his deed and carried on.
Alternatively, you could make it a bit different by carrying it on with a comma instead:
The dog ran, the dog fell, the dog dwelled. The dog didn't wish to be a part of such a place in his life, however, the dog did do his deed and carried on.
Basically, I want to know what the deal is here: Are those sentences with tons of semicolons that continue endlessly correct, am I wrong, or how do you accurately determine if the sentence should be snipped of semicolons?
Best Answer
As Lewis Thomas puts it, in his delightful essay "Notes on Punctuation"
(from The Medusa and the Snail):