Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. The little word “and,” we probably all know, is a conjunction. It connects things: “She is tall and thin” means she is ...

The semicolon is used to indicate a pause, usually between two main clauses, that needs to be more pronounced than the pause of a comma. The hybrid between a colon and a comma, it is often considered ...

Semicolons are often used to join parts of a sentence together to establish variety and link related ideas. Unlike a colon, which separates an independent clause from descriptive information, a ...

In the first part of the series on “Understanding the conventions of academic writing”, I discussed these two common error patterns: i) Missing comma after ...