Knocked Off of My Pedestal by Semi-Colons

Just like any good student learning the “process” of writing (thought I would throw in a little Murray), I have had various grammar problems throughout my educational career. I can remember issues with the difference between “effect/affect” and a minor problem with commas, but nothing was as eye-opening for me as my realization that I had a fetish with semi-colons. When I was in my AP English class my senior year of high school, I was often very proud of my essays that I would receive high grades on and some of which my teacher even used as an example of a “good” essay. While in the midst of my high and mighty belief in my own wonderful writing skills, something happened that humbled me for life (and it was, no doubt, a good thing that I was finally knocked off of my pedestal by someone). My teacher decided to send all of the students’ essays into her friend who was a professor in English for another perspective on our writing. When the essays came back, mine was once again put up on the projector but as my teacher went through it, pointing out its good and bad points, I noticed a funny pattern. On every page was a comment having something to do with semi-colons. Not only were there comments, but there were also funny little red circles around every semi-colon I had used. The amount of those funny little red circles ended up at averaging out to about one for every two sentences. Yeah. At the very end of the essay, the parting shot was for me to study up on the “rule about semi-colons” and drastically reduce my use of it. As I went back over my work, I realized that my overabundance of semi-colons mainly stemmed from my growing laziness in writing. I had apparently subconsciously decided that semi-colons could be used in the place of commas and periods. I had even used two semi-colons in the same sentence! After this experience, I vowed to never grow so lazy in my writing again by misusing a rule that was never meant to be misused.
The problem was, however, I couldn’t ever remember really learning the rule on semi-colons. Of course, I knew what they were obviously, but as most of us have realized, grammar lessons in third grade aren’t nearly enough to imbed principles in our heads for time and all eternity. So this grader could tell me as many times as she wanted to for me to change my use of it, but the fact was that I didn’t really have a way to learn the rule. So even though I cut down on my use of the grammar principle, I still didn’t know how to use it right. It honestly wasn’t until this year that I finally learned how to correctly implement semi-colons into my writing. Now I know that in order to use a semi-colon, I have to have two independent clauses that can be joined together with one, but at the time of this incident I really thought that I could use one anywhere I wanted within a sentence. This is a perfect example of grammar principles that are generally “lost” on the average population and is a reason that the teaching of grammar in schools is not nearly enough for the creation of good writers.