You can use colons to introduce lists. An example would be, "I went to the record store and bought three albums: 'Rubber Soul,' 'Blonde on Blonde' and 'Pink Moon.'" Another example would be, "In the last month, I have read novels by the following authors: Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and John Updike." You can also use them to separate two independent clauses, such as, "He saw nothing beyond the fence: this surprised him." Colons can be used with short phrases or single words for dramatic emphasis. An example is, "The speaker removed a single item from his jacket: a flask."
Use semi-colons without coordinating conjunctions to separate two independent clauses. Examples include the following: "The banker was a nervous man; these things always bothered him," and "He refused to identify his friend; his courage prevented him from doing so." You can also use semi-colons to replace commas in certain cases. For example, you should use semi-colons instead of commas in a list with names that contain commas, such as "He bought records by Miles Davis; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and Steeleye Span" or "His favorite cities include Boise, Idaho; Orlando, Florida; and Houston, Texas." You should also replace commas with semi-colons when you join two sentences with a coordinating conjunction and the first sentence contains a comma. For example, "Walking by the shore, he decided to finish his meal; and later, he smoked a cigarette.
The Irish novelist James Joyce was one of the most scrupulous users of punctuation in the history of English prose. Joyce disdained the semi-colon, and he frequently used the colon at the expense of the comma and semi-colon. The following passage is from his autobiographical novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man":
But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
Here Joyce uses a rhetorical technique called chiasmus in which two clauses are related to each through reversal. The colon allows him to emphasize the delicate balance of the chiasmus.
Unlike Joyce, Charles Dickens did not typically break the rules of English punctuation. He was, nevertheless, a master of it, as the following use of a semi-colon, which the literary scholar Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has described as "perfect":
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.
Here the somewhat tenuous link established by the semi-colon mirrors the ambiguous bond between the characters Pip and Estella in "Great Expectations" as they join hands and walk together toward an uncertain future. Like Joyce, and all other skillful users of punctuation marks, Dickens' punctuation does not just get the job done -- it underscores his ideas and themes.