The semicolon is misnamed; it is really a semi full-stop. The semicolon is used when two clauses that could be sentences (main clauses) are too closely related to be separated by something as bold as a full stop. (That full stop, unlike the first one, does not need a hyphen.) If you prefer, you can replace the semicolon with a conjunction: ‘The semicolon is misnamed, because it is really a semi full-stop.’ That is weaker, but at least you now know about colons as well. A colon is an introduction to what comes next.
Unlike a semicolon, a colon does not have to be followed by a sentence. Mrs Hewitt wants more women to have their babies at home: a recipe for disaster. It's also a cliché. To avoid the cliché, and use a semicolon, try, ‘Mrs Hewitt wants more women to have their babies at home; this is not sensible.’ A comma there would be wrong, because commas should not be used to separate main clauses unless there is also a conjunction (as in this sentence). If you wanted to use a comma, then ‘Mrs Hewitt wants more women to have their babies at home, which is not sensible’ is correct. Buried in these first two paragraphs are the rules of how to deal with commas, full stops and quotation marks, but you'll have to infer those because I don't have space.
Nobody who has been on an obstetric flying squad ever wants to go on another one. The best place for women to give birth is close to people who can help them if things go wrong. The lounge is not the place for torrential haemorrhage or asphyxiated babies. Mrs Hewitt has commissioned the Department of Health to do ‘research to support the case for home births’. Not much risk of equipoise there, then. Not having a verb, that was not even a subordinate clause, never mind a main clause; but I think it worked better as a sentence than within a sentence and delineated by a colon.
Faced with a prime minister who described the judges' decision not to deport the Afghan hijackers as an ‘abuse of common sense’, is it any wonder that I am taking refuge in punctuation? You can use common sense; you can say something goes against common sense; you can't use common sense improperly, which is what abuse is. Once you learn about semicolons, it's easy to become addicted: three commas and a but would have done just as well.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2006.
