Grammar pedantry alert notice. Those of you out there who don't care to
read expositions on the finer points of punctuation will probably want
to skip this post, though if you do don't blame me if you end up getting
this wrong in your own fics. :)

"noirchloe" <noirchloe@nyc.rr.com> wrote:

The three travelers walked along the long abandoned mountainside road;

which

was in severe disrepair, composed of cracks and crevices with small

patches

of uneven-road in-between.  Their path was bounded on the right by a
guardrail, heavily twisted and missing several long sections, overlooking

a

deep valley.

    Not sure you want that semi-colon there; it might go better placed
between 'disrepair' and 'composed' (not sure about that).

Someone else suggested a colon in the same place.  My poor colon, comma, and
semi-colon skills are shining brightly.  Although my natural inclination is
to agree with your suggested placement, I wonder if someone else might pipe
up?

Okay, quick run-down on colon and semicolon usages:

A semicolon connects two clauses that could each be independent
sentences on their own; i.e. each has its own subject and verb, and
there isn't any conjunction joining the two where the semicolon would
split them.


Examples:

This sentence uses a semicolon; each half of it could be a complete
sentence on its own.

This sentence doesn't use a semicolon, as the connecting conjunction
"as" would dangle if you split it.

I can't use a semicolon in this sentence either, the second clause being
a sentence fragment that depends on the first.


To reiterate, the test is fairly simple: split the sentence into two
(pretend you're John Belushi as Samurai Fanfic Writer) at the semicolon
without dropping any words. Does it still parse? If not, you shouldn't
use a semicolon, not without changing the wording.

You may well ask why not just split it into two sentences instead of
using the semicolon in the first place? Well, you could. The only reason
to prefer the semicolon is an aesthetic one: you feel that the two
clauses are part of the same thought, or that a full stop is too long a
pause and interrupts your paragraph's intended rhythm.


Using a colon is probably easier to do than to explain. :)  Basically,
the left-hand side makes a statement about something, and the right-hand
side specifies or clarifies what that something is. As a quick rule of
thumb, "A: B" is roughly equivalent to "A, namely, B" or "A,
specifically B."

This should not be confused with attaching a descriptive word or phrase
to a noun, which is set off with commas. The difference is that this
kind of thing follows the noun itself, whereas the colon follows
something you've said *about* the noun. (If that's unclear, as I can
well imagine it would be, please refer to the examples.)


Examples:

There's a colon in one of my example sentences: the one that you're
reading right now.

This second example sentence, the one you're currently reading, uses a
comma-offset descriptor rather than a colon.


Comma usage is a whole 'nother topic, too broad for me to discuss here.
I'll just mention that using a comma to connect what could be two
complete and independent sentences (i.e. where you could have used a
semicolon -- see above) is a type of run-on sentence specifically
referred to as a comma splice. This occasionally has actual legitimate
use in informal dialog and such, when even a semicolon would give you
too much of a pause. "Akane ain't Japan's wost cook, she's the *world's*
worst." But in the vast majority of cases, it's simply an error.


To consider your example sentence:

"The three travelers walked along the long abandoned mountainside road;
which was in severe disrepair, composed of cracks and crevices with
small patches of uneven-road in-between."

Splitting the sentence would give you:

"The three travelers walked along the long abandoned mountainside road.
Which was in severe disrepair, composed of cracks and crevices with
small patches of uneven-road in-between."

Clearly, "which" is dangling here -- it needs something before it to
refer to -- so we shouldn't have used the semicolon here.

If I broke at the other suggested place, I'd get:

"The three travelers walked along the long abandoned mountainside road,
which was in severe disrepair. Composed of cracks and crevices with
small patches of uneven-road in-between."

The second half of this is a fragment, so this doesn't work either. A
colon *would* be acceptable here, as "composed of cracks..." is
specifying what "disrepair" refers to. Other things you could do would
be either (1) use commas in both locations, or (2) reword so that a
semicolon would fit:

"The three travelers walked along the long abandoned mountainside road;
it was in severe disrepair, composed of cracks and crevices with small
patches of uneven-road in-between."

As long as I'm being pedantic here, I'll mention a couple of unrelated
points about this sentence:

1) "in-between" is a colloquial expression, probably too informal for
the tone of your narrative, for the same reason that your narrator
wouldn't want to use "whole 'nother" as I did above unless it's
consistently at that level of informality. (Do as we say, not.... ^_^;;)
I suggest dropping the "in-" and simply using "between".

2) "uneven road" shouldn't be hyphenated. "Uneven" is simply an
adjective modifying "road." Where you would hyphenate is in building a
compound adjective, i.e. a descriptor made from a two-or-more-word
phrase. Again, this will probably be clearer by example:

small patches of gravel-paved road
(we've taken the phrase "pave (with) gravel" and turned it into an
adjective, so we hyphenate)

small patches of sharply sloping road
(here we have a single-word adjective that's modified by an adverb, so
no hyphen)


Gary Kleppe
http://www.akane.org/gary/comics.html

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