Use of semicolon and dash

Question

Hi. Please help with these.1. Would you say this semicolon is correct?It is pretty well known that he has gave his change occassionally to some poor people in town; that he served breakfast to homeless people in town; that he spends his Saturday evening hours to teach Japanese to those interested in learning in town.2. Would you say what comes after a dash could be a sentence, possibly a complex or compound sentence or complex or compound sentences? Let us pretend the alphabet letters "XXX" represent the name of a certain company he worked for. eg,His job experience is extensive -- for example, he worked for XXX, an import and export company, for two years before joining our present team.

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

#1-- I'd say you need to work on your more basic grammar and spelling before you worry about semicolons and m-dashes. How about fixing these first?--

has gave
occassionally
spends ... to teach

Also, you should eliminate all those redundant 'town's and try to proof out those awkward 'that' clauses. If you polish up your sentences, you shouldn't need any semicolons at all.

#2-- 'Our present team' sounds odd. Could he have joined a 'past team'?. The m-dash is OK, but is probably too informal for this kind of text, which sounds like a sentence from a referral or an assessment.

Anonymous · Answer

Thank you for correcting my sentences. I believe I should have double-checked my sentences before posting in your forum for help. I was in a hurry to write.

Anyway, help me with these now:

I wrote:

1. Would you say this semicolon is correct?

It is pretty well known that he has gave his change occassionally to some poor people in town; that he served breakfast to homeless people in town; that he spends his Saturday evening hours to teach Japanese to those interested in learning in town.

Let me rewrite the sentences (somewhat -more or less - reflecting what you said about my sentence):

It came to our attention that he did the following for our town: He has given his change occasionally to some people; he served breakfast to homeless people on several occasions; and he spends his evening hourds teaching Japanese to those interested in learning it.

My question now is this: Do you think the underlined tenses are correct? I feel I could use the present perfect tenses, "has given", "has served" and "has spent", for all three. I think using the present tense "spends" make his teaching Japanese an on-going thing and something he does routinely, and using the past tense "served" in the clause "he served breakfast to homeless people on several occasions" gives the impression (or it might be that it is the correct contextual meaning - I don't know) that the noted action of serving breakfast on several occasion is a past event thing.

Also, please allow me to ask thes additional questions.

1. Do you commas will do for what comes after a colon like this?

It came to our attention that he did the following for our town: He has given his change occasionally to some people, he served breakfast to homeless people on several occasions, and he spends his evening hourds teaching Japanese to those interested in learning it.

2. Would you have written the original sentence of mine differently? If you would have, how would you have written it? Thank you for your anticipated help.

Mister Micawber · Answer

1. Would you say this semicolon is correct?-- No, they are too awkward. When you find yourself using more than one semicolon in a sentence, it is time to think about editing it. Let me just show you what should be done overall, and answer all of your questions at once:

It has come to our attention that he has done many things for our town: he has served breakfast to homeless people, given away his spare change, and spent his evenings teaching Japanese for free.

Worrying overmuch about whether he is actually still giving away money or teaching Japanese is not to the point of the passage and serves only to complicate the structure unnecessarily. When you learn to simplify and clarify the overall statement, you will not have to worry so much about punctuation, which was designed as an aid for the poorer writer.

Use of semicolon and dash

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