Comma and Semicolon help! QUICK HELPPP MEE!! SUMMER WORK IS DUE SOON!?

Question

If I already have a semicolon in a sentence and then a list with mulitple commas, but then I need another comma, should I make that last comma a semicolon?

It's this sentence!

What should I do!???!?!?!

It has to be perfect its for AP!

"Their Eyes Were Watching God is a traditional bildungsroman novel, or a coming-of-age novel. It’s truly about a single individual, a woman by the name of Janie Crawford, and her mental evolution into an adult; this takes her on an incredible journey where, as she gets remarried three times, abandoned by her parents and left to be raised by her old-fashioned grandmother, and loses her one true love; she discovers a worthwhile existence in the society that confines her so."

Answer 1

You need to rewrite that last sentence.  It is much too long.  How about:

It's truly about a single individual named Janie Crawford and her mental evolution into an adult.  Abandoned by her parents and raised by her old-fashioned grandmother, Janie endures remarrying three times and the loss of her one true love.  However, along the way she discovers a worthwhile existence in the society that confines her so.

Answer 2

Here is how I would write it.

"Their Eyes Were Watching God is a traditional bildungsroman, coming-of-age novel. The story is truly about a single woman, Janie Crawford, and her mental evolution into an adult; this transition takes her on an incredible journey while being abandoned by her parents, and she is left to be raised by her old-fashioned grandmother. Janie loses her one true love, but she discovers a worthwhile existence in the society that confines her so."

You did not need to say novel twice in your first sentence, so I just combined your two adjectives.

Never use contractions (e.g. "Its truely".. use, "It is truely"... ).

Also, never use "It" as your subject, use "The book is truely..." or "The novel is truely..." or "The story is truely..."

You second sentence had a lot of meaningless words, I shortened it. However, I added an appositive which will always look good on AP readers if you use them correctly.

After your first semicolon, you did not have a subject. I added "transition" for your subject. "This" is not a subject.

You second sentence was way too long and does not stay on a single subject or idea. You stretched it, and you are clearly trying too hard to use commas, appositives, and semicolons. It looks like you have no idea how to properly use punctuation. So, I chopped up your second sentence into pieces where the ideas fit together.

"As she gets married three times" is an appositive that does not work well with the current idea of the sentence, so I cut it out. This is extra information that was not crucial to the sentence.

Fixed the sentence about her parents and grandmother, made them two sentences in one using "and" and, a comma, and it worked well when I added a subject to the second part of the sentence.

The last semicolon doesn't work well, and I don't really know what you mean by "society that confines her so." It is very ambiguous, and you might want to fix that.

Answer 3

Here is how I would word the post you made:

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" is a traditional bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel.  It's truly about a single individual woman by the name of Janie Crawford and her mental development into an adult.  This takes her on an incredible journey in which she is abandoned by her parents and left to be raised by her old-fashioned grandmother. She loses her one true love and is re-married three times.  Yet, she discovers a worthwhile existence in the society that confines her so.

The problem isn't if you should use a semicolon or not.  The problem is with the structure of the whole paragraph.  That is how I would word the paragraph if I was turning it in for a grade.  It is essentially the same thing you said, only grammatically correct.  The only real change I made was changing the word "evolution" to "development".  The word "evolution" is misused and overused too much.  People don't evolve into adults, they develop and grow into them.  An adolescent human and an adult human are still humans.  They haven't evolved into anything different.