I feel I have used colons often recently, and would like to know I am using them correctly. I learned from "Wikipdedia" and found four major uses for colons. Besides digestion, colons can be used for the following sentences:
- syntactical-deductive: introduces the logical consequence, or effect, of a fact stated before
- There was only one possible explanation: the train had never arrived.
- syntactical-descriptive: introduces a description—in particular, makes explicit the elements of a set
- I have three sisters: Catherine, Sarah and Mary.
- appositive: introduces a sentence with the role of apposition with respect to the previous one
- segmental: introduces a direct speech, in combination with quotation marks and dashes. The segmental function was once a common means of indicating an unmarked quotation on the same line. The following example is from Fowler's grammar book, The King’s English:
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- Benjamin Franklin proclaimed the virtue of frugality: a penny saved is a penny earned.
Colons Are GooD~
I LOVE your title. That was so creative and funny. I cannot imagine someone passing on reading an article with such colorful and funny prose. I am going to look at the dreaded colon myself in a couple weeks and hopefully I can use your article as a resource. Thanks for taking the time to add humor to your grammar post, it’s like milk for what would normally be dry cookies.
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