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Comment by codesections | Hacker News Reader

Semicolons can also be extremely helpful for lists with internal punctuation, especially in technical writing. I recently wrote the following sentence in some documentation:

  By default, Gutenberg will look for three templates:
  index.html, which is applied to the site homepage; 
  section.html, which is applied to all sections (any 
  HTML page generated by creating a directory within 
  your content directory); and page.html, which is 
  applied to all pages (any HTML page generated by 
  creating a .md file within your content directory).

Omitting semicolons from that sentence would have made it much harder to understand, at least in my view.

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Whenever I find myself writing lists in technical writing, I seriously consider if I can express that information in a table or bullet list.

That's a good point. In general prose, I try to avoid a lot of lists and tables precisely because it sort of screams "manual" or something else dry. But, I agree, that it's often easier to parse a bullet list especially in technical writing and other straightforward communication of information.

Technical writing is a bit of a different beast: you’re writing both to instruct first-time readers and to serve as an authoritative reference for people who have read the document or are otherwise already familiar with the subject.

you mention quite a formal list (introduced by a colon) but it also serves well in simple lists:

The dinner was attended by Ms. A, the President of the Board of Education, Mr. B, the Vice-President, and other dignitaries.

Becomes much clearer when expressed

The dinner was attended by Ms. A, the President of the Board of Education; Mr. B, the Vice-President; and other dignitaries.

and is allowed in this construct though rare. Basically, whenever there is a comma inside a comma-separated term you can turn the higher-level commas into semicolons to indicate this. Makes things super-clear.

Personally, I'd probably have used parentheses for the dependent which clauses rather than commas. But, yes, there are situations where you have lists of things that sometimes have to embed commas and then it makes sense to separate the items with semicolons.

I never thought of using the semicolon for the purpose of delimiting descriptive lists.

As opposed to some sibling comments, which express that bullets should instead be used, I think this offers a good alternative.

The article is talking specifically about the use of the semicolon creative writing.

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