>>30122039
One important rule of english writing that will help you past the 101 level: never say never. Lots of experts like to give you strict, hard and fast rules about academic writing but most of them are easy to bend and break if you know what you're doing--and your writing will be better for it. They just don't want you to try until you've reached that point. Semicolons can be very useful in academic writing, and you'll come to see that once you dive into your Critical Approaches to Literature classes and start seeing the absolute monster sentences Derrida, Barthes and the like churn out. Sometimes breaking a very cumbersome and complex idea into little chunks does it a disservice and it's best preserved using syntactical guideposts to lead your reader through the relations between your clauses as explicitly as possible.