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Is the use of a semicolon in the sentence 'The south sided with the King; the north with the usurper.' correct?

The convention is that only clauses which are independent can be separated by a semicolon. Your second clause is not independent and therefore should be separated from the first with a comma. Your ...
TimR's user avatar
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2 votes

Nested quotations & internal commas: an edge case

What did Bob say? "Hello." — probably with a period after it. One convention (I believe there are others) is to turn periods into commas when you quote text and the period doesn't fall at ...
Peter Shor 's user avatar
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Nested quotations & internal commas: an edge case

There is absolutely no need for the commas before the reported speech. Either of them. The best version of this sentence is: Alice says "Bob said 'Hello,'" and she smiles at the memory. ...
DJClayworth's user avatar
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Punctuations and Closing Quotation Mark

Where the quote is just a single sentence (or less), then I close the quote before adding the full stop. But where there are multiple full stops within the quote, then I put the last one within the ...
Arthur Fisher's user avatar
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Is it ok to have a semicolon after a colon or em dash? (or other variations)

Robert Louis Stevenson writes, in The Adventure of the Hansom Cab [The Literature Network]: The drawing-room began to look empty: the baccarat was discontinued for lack of a banker; more than one ...
Edwin Ashworth's user avatar
2 votes

What do you call a symbol "—||—" for repeating something that has already been written? Does it have a name at all?

As Fumblefingers noted, this is a form of ditto mark. Wikipedia notes that the form -----"----- is used in Russian, Swedish, and Norwegian. Also, some extension of Latex can do these
GEdgar's user avatar
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4 votes

What do you call a symbol "—||—" for repeating something that has already been written? Does it have a name at all?

FumbleFingers commented: I'd say it's just a somewhat florid / ornate (non-standard? idiosyncratic?) ditto mark.

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