Question

Which sentence correctly uses the semicolon?

(It was already late in the evening; and I wanted to go to bed.) There was no reason to stay awake, since we knew that the power would not come back on until the morning. (It had been a most unpleasant coincidence that the power outage had come when we had guests staying over; the entire house was full.) (Still, most of our guests had been understanding about it; so there was, for the most part, good humor all around.) Staying on the second floor of the house were Uncle John, Aunt Sally, cousin Roger, Pete, the twins, and myself. (We had it worse than everyone on the first floor, all the windows in all the upstairs rooms were tinted; and there wasn’t enough moonlight in the first place.)

Answer 1

(It had been a most unpleasant coincidence that the power outage had come when we had guests staying over; the entire house was full.)

Step-by-step explanation:

The sentences are sematically linked, so the semicolon is connecting the two sentences coherently. This means that the semicolon can be replaced by a connector: It had been a most unpleasant coincidence that the power outage had come when we had guests staying over since the entire house was full. The coherence is related to a known or evident reason.