Point virgule.

The French have been bemoaning the demise of the semicolon. Frankly, I rarely use them - I tend to use the dash instead. Might seem a bit sloppy, and I certainly wouldn't use the dash in a formal letter, so what about the semicolon? As a Civil Servant I was brought up on Gower's "Plain Words" and my recollection is that his advice was to use as few "stops" as possible, and to use them to give rhythm to what you are writing - so a comma is a small pause, a semicolon a longer one, and so on. And the dash - well as I recall Gower didn't like it, but it sort of comes naturally to me, so now I am no longer constrained by the need to be seen to be writing as a representative of HMG, I feel free to indulge myself.