HELPP ASAP--- Reverend Sykes used his pulpit more freely to express his views on individual lapses from grace: Jim Hardy had bee
n absent from church for five Sundays and he wasn’t sick; Constance Jackson had better watch her ways – she was in grave danger of quarreling with her neighbors; she had erected the only spite fence in the history of the quarters. In at least 75 words, explain how the semicolons are used in the excerpt.
The semicolon is used in the text above, to cause an intermediate effect between the comma and the period. In this case, when he used a semicolon the author was indicating to the reader that it was necessary to pause, in reading, longer than the pause of a comma, but less long than the pause of a point. This is done because the sentence displays a partially complete thought, but it will present more arguments to be finalized.
In a more simplified way, we can say that the use of a semicolon in the text above was made to separate long coordinated sentences with the same syntactic function.
