Purposeful Punctuation

This chapter was very useful to me because I always felt that I knew how to use commas and semicolons appropriately, but I couldn't explain it in technical terms. The way I did it in the past was usually based on sound; if there was a pause, I put in a comma. If there was a longer pause, and it was two separate ideas, it was a semicolon. Of course this didn't always work, but it worked well enough for it to appear that I knew what I was doing. As far as dashes are concerned, I still don't like them even though I know how to use them properly now. They distract me too much from what I'm reading.