I've learned after my first legal writing assignment that "lawyers do not like long sentences" and that I should remove all semi-colons. It's true that short sentences are the norm in most technical writing. But I'm reluctant to give up the semi-colon. It's the most difficult punctuation mark to master, and I like to practice using it. The semi-colon conveys so much subtlety in the rhetorical balancing of tension and resolution; flat declaration seems so blunt.