Writeability

To follow-up on Tuesday's daily tip, I thought it would only be appropriate to explore the semicolon's older, stronger, brother - the colon.

The colon is most often seen following what could be a stand alone sentence. Its use, in such scenarios, brings together the first "annunciatory" phrase with a second complete thought that expands on the first. For instance:

There is only one rule to observe when living in this house: no cookies before breakfast!

When there is more to be explained about the first phrase, the second phrase is also preceded by a colon, as seen in the example:

My mother does not drive at night: her astigmatism is too severe.

A colon can also act as the yoke between two opposing statements:

You talk: I'll drive.

Aside from its ability to exemplify, restate, elaborate, undermine, explain or balance that which comes before (Truss, 2003: 120), you can tell from my use of colons throughout this post that it also fulfills the role of "introducer" quite often:

• When starting lists
• When separating main titles from subtitles of books or films
• When separating character names from their dialogue in a script
• To start off long quotations
  

The colon creates a stronger pause than the semicolon, yet it does not elicit the full-stop of a period. Similarly, the semicolon provides a stronger pause than the comma, which one can think of as the baby of the punctuation family - perhaps that would explain its popularity!