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In Sabriel by Garth Nix, near the beginning of Chapter Two, there is the following sentence: Anything powerful enough to cross the Wall usually retained enough magic to assume the shape of a soldi...
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:29:42Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/34901 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
matt_rule
·
2019-12-08T08:29:42Z (almost 5 years ago)
In _Sabriel_ by Garth Nix, near the beginning of Chapter Two, there is the following sentence: _Anything powerful enough to cross the Wall usually retained enough magic to assume the shape of a soldier; or to become invisible and simply go where it willed, regardless of barbed wire, bullets, hand grenades and mortar bombs – which often didn't work at all, particularly when the wind was blowing from the north, out of the Old Kingdom._ This 58-word construction seems quite unwieldy; it features not only a semicolon and an em dash – commas are used in a similar way, so I wonder whether the author should have split it up into smaller sentences. **When used to divide a sentence up into smaller portions, how do semicolons, commas and em dashes differ in their correct usage?**
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-04-07T23:05:22Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 8