Colons Do Two Things: They Separate, and They Indicate

Jim LaBate
4 min readFeb 4, 2021
Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash

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 and (2) to indicate what will follow. The first use is pretty easy; the second is a bit more complicated.

Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash

Colons Separate

You may have already used a colon in one of the following situations:

• To separate the salutation of a business letter from the body of that letter

– Dear Mr. Kennedy:

• To separate the hours from the minutes in a reference to time

– I’ll meet you at 9:30 a.m.

• To separate the chapter from the verse in a Bible reference

– John 3:16.

• To separate the numbers in a proportion

--

--

Jim LaBate

Jim LaBate is a writer and teacher who assists in The Writing Center at Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) in Troy, New York.