How Dare You Colon My Sentence?
Em dashes kinda suck too!
Welcome punctuation nerds! And punctuation curious. I’m delighted you’re here. I love your likes and comments - keep ‘em coming.
Random winners of the Weekend Friends book giveaway have been selected. More new book giveaways coming soon.
How do you make a random selection? So glad you asked. I assigned each name a number and used a random number generator to pick for me. It’s the digital version of drawing from a hat.
Colons - Blech!
I finished reviewing copy edits for my debut novel (shameless plug alert) The Pelican Tide releasing (new date) June 11, 2024 from Lake Union Publishing. I was blown away by the attention to detail the copyeditor paid to my story. Each editing pass has taught me something new. There have also been a few surprises.
One surprise I learned is that I HATE colons. It’s a perfectly fine and useful mark of punctuation. I use them for items in a series, formal letters, and recording time. But that’s it. This full stop mid-sentence nonsense, no way, no how.
Do you have a favorite or reviled mark of punctuation?
I may need grammar therapy (is there such a thing?) to understand my aversion to this powerful point of punctuation. But that’s fodder for a short story.
The whole punctuation editing process piqued my interest about punctuation. Who determined what marks were to be used and how? How dare they?
Last March I spent a fascinating afternoon at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts. This out of the way museum is definitely worth the trip if you’re traveling to the Boston area and are a word, printing, graphic design, or book lover. I enjoyed my time there so much I became a member. They have an interesting gift shop too. The museum has free booklets throughout its exhibits and one that I picked up was A Short History of Punctuation. I decided now was the time to read it.
A Long, Long, Long Time Ago
It stands to reason that punctuation is as old as written alphabets. What follows are highlights from 1A Short History of Punctuation.
Here are some other resources:
Punctuation begins in the 3rd Century BCE in the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt. The library had a massive collection of Greek scrolls that were difficult to read becausethegreeksdidnotusepunctuation.
The librarian Aristophanes suggested “readers could annotate their documents with dots of ink aligned with the middle, bottom, or top of each line.”
The Romans conquered the Greeks and we meet Cicero, a famous orator. “The end of a sentence ought to be determined not by the speaker’s pausing for breath, or by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm.”
The Romans experimented with dots between words to indicate separations. Then that went by the wayside.
The Rise of Books and Christianity
In the 7th Century comes Isidore of Seville. He was the first (recorded) person to connect punctuation with meaning, giving us a low point mark, the precursor to the comma, and a highpoint mark, the precursor to the period.
Five centuries later Boncompagno da Sigma has a new systems of slashes for a pause and a dash to end a sentence. Or what was considered a sentence.
Mid-1450s Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press literally casts punctuation in lead. Lots of people get involved.
We see the modern comma, semicolon, exclamation mark, colon, and question mark.
15th Century the Italian printer, Aldus Manutius standardizes punctuation.
I couldn’t help myself and made this graphic. Wouldn't it be great on a T-shirt? You know you want one. Of course what’s missing are the women behind the men.
Back to Colons
Colon comes from the Greek word for limb. But that doesn’t explain my aversion. I have a library of grammar resources including several editions of Diana Hacker, A Writer’s Reference.
“The colon is used primarily to call attention to the words that follow it.”
Use 1. Use a colon after an independent clause (aka sentence) to direct attention to a list (items in a series), an appositive, or a quotation.
Ah, the appositive. This was my first clue to my unhappiness. Appositives can be set off either by commas or the stronger colon. Guess I’m a softy.
Use 2. Use a colon between independent clauses if the second summarizes or explains the first. Yup, my copyeditor used this grammatical construction in several sentences. My jaw hardened. I would rather have two sentences than the colon juncture.
Use 3. Other fiddly bits: use a colon after a valuation in a formal letter; to indicate hours and minutes (US spelling only); to show proportions; between a title and subtitle; and to separate city from publisher and dates in bibliographies.
Tip! There are a variety of free citation generators to take the guesswork out of citing sources. Here’s one.
With the colon usage rules now fresh in my mind, I determined my aversion was a matter of style. I don’t write sentences with colons (usually). I have a draft in my to-write Substack archive on style, discussing what it is, how to use style manuals, and why it’s important. For me, colons and style also track with writing voice. Colons in sentences, while grammatical, feel fussy and formal. I’m yet to learn the ruling on my no colon request from Lake Union editorial. Stay tuned.
Lightening Round of Cool Punctuation Facts
The Interrobang a nonstandard mark that is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point.
The Grawlix - these are the random symbols used to represent swears in comics. This deserves its own newsletter.
The hashtag, pound sign, Oglethorpe - history here. #
The @ sign - history here.
Final Thoughts
Happy holidays. I wish peace to everyone, of all faiths. Let us be united in our curiosity about how we are more alike than we are different. Thank you for reading and coming along on my Substack adventure. You can look forward to more giveaways, interesting author and expert interviews about research, and news about my book launch, now set for June 11, 2024.
A Short History of Punctuation. Museum of Printing, Haverhill Massachusetts
I tend to use the em-dash when I should probably be using the colon or semi-colon. Em-dash just looks better.
I enjoy a colon and a semi-colon from time to time, but I love (and badly overuse) em-dashes.