Day 267: Use semicolons to join two independent clauses.

Semicolons serve a purpose that is part comma and part period. The primary use of the semicolon is to show how two thoughts are connected; they join independent clauses without a conjunction. Consider these two sentences.

“The desk surface was rough. His arms were rubbed raw.”

These are two separate thoughts. The connection between them isn’t clear. What does sentence two have to do with sentence one? We use a semicolon to show that connection.

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

“The desk surface was rough; his arms were rubbed raw.”

This sentence has two independent clauses joined by a semicolon. Now we know that the significance of sentence two derives from the content in sentence one.

As you can see from this example, we don’t need a conjunction after the semicolon as we would with a comma in that place. Also notice that both parts could stand as complete sentences. We can’t do this with sentence fragments.