Introduction to the semicolon | The Colon and semicolon | Punctuation | Khan Academy

- [Voiceover] Hello, grammarians.

In this video, I'm gonna tell you about

a piece of punctuation
called the semicolon,

which basically looks like a comma

with a period on top of it.

The semicolon has a few uses, but,

the basic sort of standard use

is to link two closely related ideas,

that can stand on their own
as individual sentences.

So that might sound a little weird,

you think there's two
individual sentences,

so they just have a
period in between them,

why do they need to be linked?

Well, let's look at an example,

and I'll show you what I mean.

I'm a big fan of roller coasters,

but if I weren't I could
say something like,

I don't wanna ride the Mega Sky Coaster;

I'm afraid of heights, and
that ride sounds terrifying.

Now you notice, we have a semicolon here

in between these parts,
but let's take a step back,

and just put a period here for a second.

So now we have, I don't wanna
ride the Mega Sky Coaster.

Period.

I'm afraid of heights, and
that ride sounds terrifying.

Exclamation point.

These can work on their
own, as different sentences.

But they're so closely tied together.

You know, I say I don't want
to ride the Mega Sky Coaster,

it's sort of telling us the back story

as to why I don't wanna ride it.

So we can use a semicolon in this instance

to sort of tie the two
sentences together into one.

Now we can't go around tying
every sentence to each other,

we can't have everything just connected

with a whole bunch of semicolons,

it works in this case
because these clauses

are sharing such similar information.

In this sentence, the two clauses

that are directly connected
are both independent clauses.

This makes sense, because
the semicolons job

is to connect things that can

stand on their own as sentences,

but, a sentence isn't always

just an independent clause by itself.

One example of this would
be, I wanna get a pet turtle,

semicolon, however, I think it
might scare my baby brother.

This is an independent
clause, and so is this,

but the however in between the two of them

can make things a little bit confusing.

That's why it's important
to note that you can

have a semicolon, followed
by an introductory adverb,

or a transitional phrase.

It doesn't just have to
be independent clause,

semicolon, independent clause, period.

You can have other clauses and
phrases and words in there.

As long as the things that
you're linking together

can stand on their own
as individual sentences.

There's another place
we can use semicolons,

which is in a complex list.

In this case, it's called a super comma,

but we're gonna get to
that in another video.

So for now, this is
how you use a semicolon

to link parts of a sentence.

If the words to the left
and the words to the right

of the semicolon can stand
as individual sentences

with a period in between them,

you can put a semicolon there instead.

You can learn anything, Paige out.