Punctuation

Yangtze

Suggest improvements for the highlighted problem area: For thousands of years the Yangtze has helped shape Chinese society. The river sustains life, it provides income and food to nearly one billion people. It carries people to the ocean as the water flows east, it brings others inland as the winds blow west. Above all, the Yangtze has shaped the culture. This culture includes occupations, such as farming, fishing, and even banditry, stories, especially to explain the names of every cliff and boulder, and old beliefs, including the usefulness of whistling and the danger of leaping fish. This last piece of culture is very interesting. The old belief is that any fish that leaps into one's boat is a demon. To avoid bad luck, one must do the following; take the fish ashore, dig a hole, and bury it. Answer: - Using the Semicolon to Coordinate - Not all sentences need to stand alone. Sometimes it is useful to link them together to show that they are closely related. One way to do this is to use a comma with a coordinating conjunction. Another way is to use a semicolon. The semicolon provides a pause for the reader that is more noticeable than that of a comma, but less final than the pause of a period. Consider an example from our opening paragraphs: The river sustains life, it provides income and food to nearly one billion people. In this sentence the second clause restates the idea in the first clause. A semicolon is appropriate to signal this restatement: The river sustains life; it provides income and food to nearly one billion people.

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