Personally, I'm a huge fan of semicolons; I find that they connect two related sentences pretty well. (See what I did there? I know, I know; I'm not cute.) I like that they suggest more of a pause than a stop—when I want someone to [i]stop,[/i] I use an em-dash. I feel like if you use punctuation carefully, it creates a lot of nuance and helps a lot with pacing. I'm also a huge [i]nerd[/i] who wants to be an editor when she grows up, so I know I'm totally in the minority. (Ask me how I feel about the Oxford comma. Go ahead.)