What is the 'it'?

At one time I had a section of the book devoted to the semicolon. One of the many regrets in my life is that I took it out of the finished product, on the basis that I felt that the book was starting to look like a general grammar text – territory I am wholly unqualified to occupy and which it was never my intention to traverse. On reflection, though, I should have left it in; like the difference between who and whom – which is in the book – it continues to be a recurring issue in the judgments I work on.

The semicolon might look like a comma/colon hybrid, but unlike, say, the interrobang (shout-out to Justice Wigney of the Federal Court of Australia), it is a long-established and entirely conventional item of punctuation. The only problem is, nobody seems to know how to use it. I sometimes find a judge placing a semicolon where, really, a comma is all that was required – a decision frequently based, it seems to me, on the length of the sentence. That is wrong thinking. If a comma does the job, use a comma. That’s what it’s for.

Or maybe a kind of punctuation panic can set in: notwithstanding that the semicolon is in a given situation the worst available option, it might end up being the option taken. Often enough nobody can definitively say that the semicolon is wrong. But there is likely to be a better alternative. Sometimes that better alternative will be a dash. Sometimes it will be a colon. Most of the time, it will be a comma.

I am going to go out on a somewhat tenuous limb here and say that there are really only two situations where the semicolon should be your punctuation of choice.

You are probably used to semicolons being used to separate items in a sentence that is in the form of a list, especially where one of the items is of some length or complexity, or itself includes commas. That is a good and orthodox use of the semicolon – as long as it is used consistently across the entire span of the list, of course.

Semicolons can also be used to break up a sentence that is made up of two separate statements. This is a useful device if there is a connection between the two statements which would be lost if they were written as separate sentences; the semicolon provides that connection. (See what I did there?)

A word of caution, though: this use of the semicolon should really only be adopted if what comes after the semicolon reads as a complete grammatical sentence. Otherwise it is likely to be misread. Consider the following:

This Act has been referred to as an “amending Act”; given that its main purpose is to make amendments to the principal Act.

Many readers – perhaps most – will interpret the words “given that” sitting immediately after the semicolon as meaning that what they are about to read is qualifying something that they will get to later in the sentence. But that thing never arrives; what they get is a full stop – and a heavy heart on account of having to go back and read the whole sentence again.

Of course, when they do reread the sentence it will make perfect sense: by then they will know how it is meant to work. Does that make it alright? Not on my watch. A temporary ambiguity is still an ambiguity. Nobody wants to be forced to retrace their steps in order to make sense of what they have just read.

What would the same sentence have looked like with a comma? It would have looked like this:

This Act has been referred to as an “amending Act”, given that its main purpose is to make amendments to the principal Act.

If it had been written that way in the first place, nobody would have been confused, and the judge wouldn’t have ended up with a grumpy reader. (Fortunately for the judge, that grumpy reader was me. And I never stay grumpy for long.)