Okay, recently I’ve been working on a lot of people’s stories that are fantastic except for one thing—one easily fixable thing—they have semicolons everywhere. The semicolon is that little bit of punctuation that looks like there’s a comma on the bottom and a period topping it. And judging from people’s use of it? It’s an addictive, sexy beast. Most people think they understand the semicolon. It’s a period topping a comma, right? You use it to do something or um … yeah …? Here’s the thing, a semicolon is a divider. It’s like a comma and a period that way, but it’s not. It creates a different length of the pause for the reader between the words that it divides. Yes! There are different levels of pause. Here check it out. We’ll do it with three sentences. The first is a comma, but it will be a minimal pause. Shaun wanted to talk about naughty things, but Carrie was not going to let him do that today. Here is that same sentiment but with a medium-weight pause. Shaun wante...