These are brief thoughts on punctuation, in no way intended as a primer. If you don't know how to punctuate--and many college students still don't--run, do not walk, to the Writing Center.
The Period. There is not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough. If you find yourself hopelessly mired in a long sentence, you're trying to make the sentence do more than it can reasonably do. The quickest way out is to break the sentence into two or even three smaller sentences. There is no minimum length for a sentence that is acceptable in the eyes of man and God.
The Comma. This is one of those punctuation marks that should require a three-day waiting period and a license to use it. Used in pairs, commas set off elements that are actually parenthetic in nature (not vital to the sentence's syntax). If one of the pair is omitted, part of the parenthetic matter is run into a clause or phrase to which it does not belong, producing a sentence that is awkward in its association of ideas and difficult to read. But by far the greatest danger lurking in comma usage is its substitution for a period or semicolon. Try taking the time to read aloud what you have written; your sense of rhythm should tell you if you have created an unwieldy monster of a sentence, running headlong and tripping over its own feet. Where a definite pause is required, or where you are dealing with separate ideas, lose the comma and use a period or semicolon. Also worth noting: when you are quoting from a text, commas and periods go inside the closing quotation marks UNLESS you are including a parenthetical page reference. In that case, the punctuational order is as follows: closing quotation mark--parenthetical reference--comma or period.
The Semicolon. There is a nineteenth-century elegance about the semicolon; we associate it with the carefully balanced sentences, the judicious weighing of "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" of Thackeray and Emerson. If you need to balance pro and con, or weigh two sides of the same problem, give it a try: "Let us grant the evils of vicarious living; let us also grant its necessity."
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