"Sun too beats down: is not an umbrella also appropriate protection against sun?" "But why limit it, then, to wet weather?" Harry wanted to know. (There of course would be a capital letter if the first word of the phrase were a proper noun or acronym.) Being a phrase and all, there is no capital letter. Here, the phrase following the colon illustrates what comes before it. Mabel the Cat was adamant that Harry recognize the usefulness of umbrellas for all wet weather: as protection against rain, sleet, and snow. Lowercase also happens to be Merriam-Webster's style.) Be consistent: capitalize the first letter in every clause that follows a colon, or always use lowercase.
(Note that in British English the style is typically to go lowercase. As a clause-it has its own subject and verb and could in fact function alone as its own sentence, albeit a sentence of the question variety-it certainly looks like something that can start with a capital letter, but whether it does or not is simply a matter of style. Note that what follows the colon is not capitalized, but it could be.
In this example, what comes after the colon explains just what the argument referred to in the first part of the sentence is all about. Harry the Dog and Mabel the Cat were having an impassioned argument about umbrellas: are umbrellas properly to be used only for rain? Let's first look at some colons introducing clauses and phrases that explain, illustrate, amplify, and restate what's come before: (Reminder: clauses and phrases are both groups of words within a sentence the basic difference between them is that a clause has its own subject and verb, while a phrase does not.)Ĭolons are also hard to find in stock photography, so just go with it. In the running prose that we encounter in books, magazines, articles, and the like, colons are mostly used to introduce a clause or a phrase that explains, illustrates, amplifies, or restates what precedes them. (This is quite a different function from that of the semicolon, which is mostly used to separate two independent sentence parts that are related in meaning.) It's typically a mark of introduction, used to let the reader know that what follows the colon has been pointed to or described by what precedes the colon. We all know the colon, right? It's a punctuation mark that looks like two dots stacked, like a period with another period hovering above it : For example, this summary could be written as "Colons can introduce many things: descriptors, quotes, lists, and more." What Is a Colon?
Often they are used to introduce a quote or a list that satisfies the previous statement. Colons (:) introduce clauses or phrases that serve to describe, amplify, or restate what precedes them.
0 kommentar(er)
