<story><title>On Semicolons and the Rules of Writing</title><url>https://themillions.com/2018/07/on-semicolons-and-the-rules.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codesections</author><text>Semicolons can also be extremely helpful for lists with internal punctuation, especially in technical writing.  I recently wrote the following sentence in some documentation:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  By default, Gutenberg will look for three templates:
  index.html, which is applied to the site homepage; 
  section.html, which is applied to all sections (any 
  HTML page generated by creating a directory within 
  your content directory); and page.html, which is 
  applied to all pages (any HTML page generated by 
  creating a .md file within your content directory).
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Omitting semicolons from that sentence would have made it much harder to understand, at least in my view.</text></comment>
<story><title>On Semicolons and the Rules of Writing</title><url>https://themillions.com/2018/07/on-semicolons-and-the-rules.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lloeki</author><text>I quite entertained the same point of view of the author about semicolons. The best use of them is when they&amp;#x27;re used sparingly, hence carrying more precise weight and meaning.&lt;p&gt;Now there is something quite peculiar about that punctuation mark&amp;#x27;s naming, which has some dissonant trait of causality (what colons are used for), and always found the French name &amp;quot;point-virgule&amp;quot; (period-comma) much more apt.</text></comment>