Semicolons are for when you're feeling to lazy to put ", and". Also if you've already used ", and" in your sentence. Could lead to sentence overcomplexity if you aren't careful.
Examples:
I picked her up from work today; she hadn't changed.
I picked her up from work today, and she was still angry; she hadn't changed.
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Well, according to what I learned when I was in Algebra I, you should never have to use a semicolon.
no
Once.
The semicolon is used to indicate a separate clause in a sentence. It separates this new clause from the rest of the sentence. For example... "I'm having a day off work today; the first in two weeks!" The semicolon splits these two stand alone clauses in this sentence. What's a clause you may ask. Well, it is any group of words that make grammatical sense, usually containing a noun, a verb and an object.
A semicolon is used to join two independent clauses together. An example of two independent clauses joined together via semicolon is: "Baum's book is a political allegory; few people today would recognize the political events in this story."