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Colons Do Two Things: They Separate, and They Indicate
If you’ve ever played a round of golf, you know that you have a full bag of clubs available to you. You have a driver and two or three woods to give you power when you tee off. You also have numerous irons to help you make those delicate approach shots to the green. You may even have a pitching wedge in case your ball ends up in the sand trap. Finally, of course, you must have a putter, so you can gently tap your ball into the hole. Just as a golfer needs a full bag of clubs to score well, as a writer, you need to use a full bag of punctuation marks to communicate effectively.
From my experience as a Composition teacher, I’ve noticed that many student writers use only two basic punctuation marks: the comma and the period. Students often ignore other punctuation marks — such as the dash, the colon, and the semicolon — primarily because these students don’t know how to use the punctuation marks correctly. As a result, students don’t score as well on their essays as they might because they’re not using all the tools available to them. This essay will focus on the colon.
The colon looks like one period placed on top of another period and is located to the right of the letter “L” on your keyboard, on the same key as the semicolon. The colon can be used in various situations, but it is used primarily for two tasks: (1) to separate…