![]() If it isn’t, you may not need any punctuation at all. With lists, what precedes the colon should almost always be a complete sentence. Off the top of my head, here are some conventional uses for colons: to separate title from subtitle in bibliographies and endnotes to separate speaker from speech in scripts, interview transcriptions, and other dialogue and to introduce lists (see how I snuck that one in at the beginning of this sentence?). The colon comes in handy in number-free text too. We use it to express ratios (3:1 means three parts of one thing to every one part of another). We use it to separate chapter and verse in the Bible and certain other books (Psalm 23:6). where I am in 24-hour military time, however, that would be a non-colonic 0944). We use them with time (it’s now 9:44 a.m. When it comes to numbers, the colon is a workhorse, getting the job done without fanfare. Colons not so much, and so far I haven’t come across a T-shirt that expressed an opinion about colons. That’s what I mean: writers and editors tend to have strong feelings about semicolons, pro and con. I once gave a writer friend a semicolon sticker and she promptly drew a red international NO symbol over it. ![]() I have a T-shirt that praises semicolons. However, unlike, say, semicolons, they don’t inspire great passion. Colons don’t get lost at the end of a word the way commas often do. ![]() Let’s take a look at colons of a punctuational kind. No, this is not about the medical procedure. My semicolon T-shirt has a semicolon on the front and this message on the back.
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