• prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    Semicolons can be used to list items that are more than just a word or two long, and may/may not contain commas. So if you’re listing phrases contain commas, putting a comma between list entries would be confusing as fuck.

    For example… I will list a few US capital cities, and their corresponding states: Albany, New York, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Sacramento, California, Houston, Texas…

    Compare that to: Albany, New York; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Sacramento, California; Houston, Texas.

    See? Much clearer.

    I don’t know if this person did it exactly correctly, and I’m not going to go back and read it again to check, but the idea itself is just fine.

    Unless a lot has changed about semi-colons in the past 20 years.

    Edit: I reluctantly went up to read it again, and it seems like the only thing missing would be a colon after “The combo of” and a comma before “really says it all”