Some people find punctuation extremely daunting, the errant apostrophe seems to trip everybody up, and even though I had a fantastic grounding in English grammar when I was about twelve (thank you Miss Maynard), there are things I'm still a little hesitant about.
When I'm writing, I get totally absorbed in the rhythm of my work -- each phrase has its own particular beat which in turn feeds into the overall metre of the sentence and then the paragraph. In some ways it's like a musical score, and if you think of it like that then punctuation becomes a little easier. Commas, semi-colons and colons are really the measure of different lengths of pause: picture the shortest, the comma, as a quaver, the semi-colon as a crotchet and the colon as a minim. They are there to isolate phrases so that they make sense to the reader and enable her to pace herself throughout a sustained piece of writing - in some cases they are almost a pause for breath.
So listen to the music of the voice inside your head and you will find that the breaks will come naturally as the sense settles into place. It is not infallible, but as a rule of thumb it can be helpful.
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