Join two sentences with a semicolon!
I know what you are thinking: a post from English for University. Com! That’s unusual! Yes, things have been pretty hectic recently meaning that I haven’t been posting much over the past few weeks. Well, now that I have nearly finished marking a very large pile of reports from the end of last term I promise to write more.
As I was marking, I couldn’t help noticing that lots of students seem to think that they can take two basic sentences and join them together with a comma. Take a look:
Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK + the owners of Heathrow want to build a third runway to expand its capactiy.
=
Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK, its owners want to build a third runway to expand its capacity.
Sorry guys, no can do!
You have to do more work than that! The sentence above is incorrect! (As I said here a little while ago.)
You can write:
Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK. Its owners…
Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK and its owners…
The easiest way to do it is:
Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK; its owners want to build a third runway to expand its capacity.
Then you can impress your reader with the correct use of a semicolon which I bet your teachers don’t see very often! Here’s a fun page about joining sentences with a semicolon (because let’s be honest, it’s pretty dry stuff!): http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon