Question

HELPP ASAP--- Reverend Sykes used his pulpit more freely to express his views on individual lapses from grace: Jim Hardy had been 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.

Answer 1

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.