Writing.Com General Discussion

I am answering a few questions and comments in this post.

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Semicolons are the correct separators when list elements contain commas.

OWL: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/566/01/
Use a semicolon to join elements of a series when individual items of the series already include commas.

Recent sites of the Olympic Games include Athens, Greece; Salt Lake City, Utah; Sydney, Australia; Nagano, Japan.

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Words such as therefore are called conjunctive adverbs and are not as strong as conjunctions: a comma and conjunctive adverb together is not strong enough to use as a full stop, so use semicolons. A comma after them is never wrong but generally only used for multi-syllabic words.

You often see literary authors -- Atwood comes to mind -- forego the semicolon in favor of the comma, but a semicolon should be used in formal writing.

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Don't discount long sentences. Not all effective writing is short and pithy.
https://cafemoi.wordpress.com/2015/04/26/the-long-compound-subordinate-sentence/...