EDITING ON THE IRT.

From "Metropolitan Diary" in today's NYT:

As a ninth grader at Hunter College High School who lives in Brooklyn, I have a pretty long trip to and from school, and I try to get some homework done on the train.

One afternoon, I was working on an editing assignment on the downtown No. 6 train, and as I was putting it away the man sitting next to me told me I had missed something. I took the paper out again, and he told me to add a comma in one of the sentences.

Then the woman sitting next to him piped in. She said that it should, in fact, be a semicolon.

I decided to go with the semicolon, but they were still discussing the right choice when I got off the train a few stops later. Hope I. Reichbach