ShmoopTube

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Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Mountain Climbing. Because your Everest

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is the actual Everest.

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They couldn't make it to the peak and back; before dark they decided to camp for the night.

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Scary, what if they get eaten by bears, or get poison oak, or get snatched by mountain

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trolls? Okay, it's possible we watch too much Lord of the Rings.

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Let's see if we can at least fix the semicolons in this sentence to lift our campers' spirits...

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Well, there are four possible places that the semicolon can go.

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On either side of the semicolon, the clause has to stand alone, so let's check each place

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to see if it forms two complete thoughts. In C, the first clause makes sense, but the

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second is a confusing mess. The sentence "to the peak and back before

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dark they decided to camp for the night" doesn't work. At all.

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B is a similar situation. Although "They couldn't make it to the peak" works as a complete sentence,

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"and back before dark they decided to camp for the night" does not.

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A? "Before dark they decided to camp for the night" isn't a complete sentence either. Buh-bye.

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Although those sentences were painful to read, at least we're left with one good answer.

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The last one of the bunch, D, forms two complete thoughts that are independent clauses, and

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separates them with a semicolon. Much the same way that mountain troll plans

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to separate the campers' heads from their bodies.

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