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Answer: “ ; ” should be “ : ”

“Legions of officials, unsmiling and somberly arrayed, filed into the room and arranged themselves on the presidium: chairman, vice-chairmen, representatives, and legates.”

Error: In this example, the writer quite effectively describes the people who filled the public space, giving readers a sense of the expressions on their faces, how they dressed, how they moved, how numerous they were, and the titles they carried into the room. However, all of this able description is wasted when the writer inserts a semicolon after “presidium,” causing readers to stumble. Semicolons separate complete sentences that are closely related; in the example, the five words following the semicolon constitute a sentence fragment. Instead of a semicolon, a colon should have been used to separate the introductory sentence from the list it introduces.

在句子中，作者傳神地描繪在公眾面前出現的人物，讓讀者掌握他們的表情、穿著、動作、人數，還有出席者的身分。然而，這些敘述頓時失去目的與用途，因為作者在presidium之後加了分號，打斷了讀者閱讀邏輯與流暢。分號的作用是分隔緊密相關的完整句子，在此句中，分號後的五個字並不是完整句子結構，所以作者不應使用分號(；)，應該使用的是冒號(：)，用以分隔前面的背景說明，與後面帶出的人物介紹清單。