ezrahenry

ezrahenry's Profile

ProfileLast updated:

Self introduction

Use of Colons, Semicolons, and Dashes in Essays to Enhance Sentence Structure - 2021 Guide

Punctuation is important in any kind of paper as it helps the reader to clearly understand the sentence and the message the writer wants to convey. Colons, semi-colons, and dashes are the three types of punctuation that are terribly powerful and you can exploit them as much as you want. 

Students who need help with grammar or sentence-structure on their paper generally turn to online essay writing services and let essay experts produce model papers so that they can learn how to properly structure their sentences without any grammatical error.

For that, all you have to do is visit a reliable site and place your Essay Writing Servicerequest so that one of their highly skilled writers will deliver you a topnotch quality essay. Regardless, learning the correct use of these punctuation marks is important. Here are some basics about these punctuation types and some tips on how you can use them in your writing to enhance the sentence structure in your essay.

Semicolons

Use these to glue two separate sentences together, where they are closely related in meaning.

For instance:

  • I opened the door. A cool breeze touched my face.

Perfect spot for a semicolon. Use it to replace the full stop in the middle, illustrating the clear logical connection between the sentences:

  • I opened the door; a cool breeze touched my face.

As another answerer said, it’s effectively doing the same job that ‘and’ would do, here.

Semicolons, anyway, help to show the connection between otherwise separate sentences, feel a bit pacier than full stops, but retain a (perhaps dramatic?) little pause that’s lost if you use ‘and’. (Also, overuse of ‘and’ will make your writing sound like that of a breathless five-year-old recounting the fantastic time they’ve had at the park, where they fed the ducks and went on the swings and played on the grass and ate an ice-cream and…)

There is one other use of semicolons, which is to separate items in lists. This isn’t usually Write My Paper, as commas will do the job:

  • Bob brought his hat, a pair of slippers, and a signed statuette of Madonna to the party.

However, you might find yourself writing a list in which the separate items need commas of their own. To keep things coherent, you can deal with this by stepping up to semicolons in between the list items:

More impressive statuary was brought to the party by the Jefferson twins, inevitably; Mr. and Mrs. Smythe, who had cast themselves in bronze for the occasion; Timothy, Gareth, and Jemima Stroop, with their adorable collection of tiny figurines amateurishly squashed into approximate humanoid form, out of Play-Doh; and a furtive-looking gentleman in a black balaclava who arrived dragging a full-scale replica of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ behind him.

Colons

Basically, colons introduce stuff. Might be an example, an explanation, or some other variety of further information. Essentially, think of a colon as a sort of ‘Ta-da!’: you see that colon and expect something that satisfies you by giving you further information about whatever went before it. It can do the same job as phrases like ‘which is’ or ‘because’ or even just ‘is’. Here, have some examples:

  • Task 1: Eat a spaniel.
  • Monday: awful. Tuesday: worse. Wednesday: Okay, I’ll admit it: Wednesday was Paper Writing Service.
  • Samantha had bitten her tongue for as long as she could, but, at last, she had to speak the truth: she couldn’t be seen with him in public in that sombrero.

Dashes

Oh, dashes. Warning: try not to get addicted. Dashes can kind of do the job of colons or semicolons, so you can wind up whacking them all over the place. The key thing with dashes is that they tend to imply a sort of improvisational, thinking-on-your-feet, change of direction - like a slight interruption in your thought, where maybe you’ve had a new idea or come up with a further example.

They can be good for tone and can also allow you - and this is quite useful, too - to add in parenthetical phrases. Of course, commas and brackets will do that, too, but each has its own particular, subtle virtue:

  • Commas tend to sustain the flow of the sentence, but, whilst this is often desirable for maintaining tone and so forth, can be confusing in long sentences that already have multiple clauses.
  • Dashes are perhaps clearer - you’re not going to miss where they begin and end - and feel a spot hastier, and are perhaps more of an interruption to the overall sentence. They allow severance from the grammar of the wider sentence, which commas do not.
  • Brackets can allow entire side-comments, affording an author to comment on their own surrounding writing (a favorite trick of some humorous writers) almost like dragging a footnote up into the college essay writing service. (They can also surround complete sentences.)