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A little about me and the purpose of this blog. I am a licensed high school teacher (Language Arts 6 - 12) in the state of Tennessee going on 13 years now. I have 7 children and drive a school bus. Love me or hate me, none of my students will tell you that I am a typical school teacher. I, like many, believe that education is woefully equipped to keep pace with technology. As a technology enthusiast and educator publishing on a crypto website, I am trying to do my small part to bridge this gap for as many people as I can. Recently, the development of AI has created an accelerated urgency for education to take its head out of the sand and teach relevant skills in the classroom. The resources, lessons, and philosophy I publish here, I use in my own classroom, and anyone (especially homeschoolers) can use this blog as a resource to supplement their own instruction. If you are new to my blog, I suggest starting at the beginning as I will be structuring my lessons here the same way I would for my classroom. Tips are appreciated. Questions and feedback in the comments are welcome. So if you are a teacher, student, or homeschooler that is motivated to learn about, teach, or utilize all available technology in education (or know someone who is), I encourage you to give me a follow: https://x.com/TheRealMrE09
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11 - 12. L.CSE.1: Demonstrate command of grammar and usage, including complex use matters.
Using AI to Master Semicolons Part 1
Semicolons get a bad rap, and they are greatly misunderstood or not understood at all by a lot of students. They are, in fact, very simple and one of the types of punctuation that I use most often. The difficulty in many high school students understanding semicolons is because they have forgotten a basic skill that they learned “ a long time ago” in middle school; that is how to identify the subject and verb in a sentence. So, this lesson will begin with a review exercise.
A critical ability is to recognize the main verb in a sentence along with its subject; equally important, is to recognize HOW MANY verbs and subjects are in a sentence. This can be tricky because participles (-ing and -ed) words can appear at first glance to be a verb when they are actually functioning as some other part of speech. This is particularly problematic because they can trick the student into thinking that a phrase or fragment is a complete sentence, or it can cause them to not realize that they are dealing with a run-on sentence that is in need of a semicolon.
Subject + Verb = Sentence
2 Subjects + 2 Verbs = 2 Sentences
2 Sentences = needs Semicolon or Conjunction
2 Sentences w/ no semicolon, no conjunction, or only a comma = Run-on Sentence
Run-on Sentence = Linguistic sin straight from the fires of Hell and fathered by the Devil himself!
Definition of a semicolon: A semicolon indicates that the author intends for the two COMPLETE ideas that he/she is presenting to be linked and relevant to each other.
Purpose of a semicolon: To avoid confusion by preventing run-on sentences.
Every time I see a run-on sentence I imagine a sleazy car salesman trying to sell me a POS vehicle that looks new on the outside but has a rotted-out undercarriage from flood damage. Or, I imagine a really bad politician trying to convince me to vote for spending billions of dollars on studying the sexual habits of Amazonian Rain Frogs because it will help the environment.
Run-on sentences have the effect of bombarding the reader with lots of information that is not clearly linked and has no visible structure to aid in organization; in the end it does nothing but confuse the reader. It's like listening to the annoying kid in class that never shuts up and just says random things that don’t make sense just so he/she can hear themselves talk.
So let’s learn how to fix them. Shall we? Because you don’t want to be that kid …
First we need to practice identifying the subjects and verbs in sentences. Enter the following prompt into your exercise to create an exercise to do this:
I am an English teacher trying to teach my students how to identify subjects and verbs in sentences so that they can add correct punctuation, particularly in compound sentences. The main difficulty in this is when some simple sentences use long gerund, participle, or prepositional phrases. Please create an exercise with 20 sentences (none of which have punctuation); the expectation is that the students will mark the subject/s and verb/s in each sentence and add a semicolon when/if the sentence is compound. Make 10 compound sentences and 10 simple sentences such as I described above so that they can practice differentiating between the two. Do not group the types of sentences together, and do not offer information to help them.
You will get something that looks like this (I’m only showing 5 for the sake of space):
The cat sleeping on the couch purred softly the dog barked
Playing the guitar at the concert was his dream he practiced every day
The students in the classroom raised their hands eagerly
After finishing the race the runners collapsed with exhaustion
The painting on the wall looked old the frame was covered in dust
First, on whichever document you place these on make sure to put a space in between each sentence; they will need the space to make marks.
Second, give the following instructions: Circle each subject. Underline each verb. Place a period at the end of each sentence (seems simple, but important; they don’t use periods when they text …). Add a semicolon in between any two complete sentences. Pay particular attention to words that end in -ing or -ed; they may NOT be an actual verb.
Third, type the following prompt into AI to check the answers:
Ok, now provide the sentences marked correctly so that I can check their work
Note: AI cannot, as of yet, underline text or mark it in any way other than putting it into bold font, so you will get something like this:
The cat sleeping on the couch purred softly; the dog barked.
Subject 1: cat, Verb 1: purred
Subject 2: dog, Verb 2: barked
Playing the guitar at the concert was his dream; he practiced every day.
Subject 1: Playing (gerund as subject), Verb 1: was
Subject 2: he, Verb 2: practiced
The students in the classroom raised their hands eagerly.
Subject: students, Verb: raised
This exercise will likely need to be repeated many times before students grasp it fully; that’s why AI is so useful, particularly in this lesson, for creating many variations of the exercise. If student’s struggle, there is another way to help reinforce the idea. Put the sentences up on the powerboard, projector, or even let them watch you edit off Google Classroom. In the sentences where they have been confused by long phrases such as “sleeping on the couch in the first example above, delete the phrase in front of them and show them that “The cat purred softly” is the main sentence. Emphasize that when they see long phrases that they need to slow down and ask themselves what is necessary and what is extra information.
Personal Opinion: Some teachers get very detailed in teaching students the exact differences between participle and gerund phrases. I do not believe this is necessary beyond teaching that a gerund is a noun and can function as the subject of the sentence. Trying to do this wastes time and can be confusing to the students; they can worry about that if they go to be English teachers. I teach ALL phrases as “extra information.” If it is not the subject and not the verb then it is extra information that can be crossed out and ignored (unless it's an appositive, but we’ll get to that latter).
Now, let's get to more direct exercises that involve just semicolons. I will show you how to create two; both of which are useful and provide variation.
- Create twenty run-on sentences that can all be corrected by a semicolon. Do not add any punctuation with the expectation that the students will add it.
- Create 10 pairs of sentences, one on top of the other, that students can combine by hand using a semicolon. Please do not use numbers or bullet points for the pairs.
In these exercises, tell the students that a semicolon is needed in every question. This will let them focus on finding where, not if, the semicolon should be. It also is good for repetition. So essentially, you have two types of exercises here.
- Do I need a semicolon?
- Where do I need a semicolon
Mix and match until the students understand the concept.
Side note: There are, of course, other nuanced uses for semicolons. The only other one that I teach is semicolons with conjunctive adverbs, which I will cover in Part 2. This is another one of those cases like the gerund phrases where as a teacher, you can “be doing too much” (as the kids would say). The two cases I have mentioned (joining sentences and conjunctive adverbs) are the only two cases that a normal person or student will ever come across. Going further with most people is just going to confuse them, and they will likely never choose in their normal life to write a sentence that contains a list of complex phrases that needs to be separated by a semicolon. Even if there were a question on a test like the ACT or end-of-course final about complex uses of semicolons, there might be one out of hundred; this is not worth the time and confusion that is easily created by going outside of these two use cases.
