When I went through the editor’s revision of my manuscript, East, I was surprised to find her peculiar use of the colon: that punctuation mark that we associate with a list. He bought: apples, pears, bananas, and strawberries. It was one of the first classroom torments in junior-high-school English class and one of the first things we forgot when we left.
So this sent me on a research mission.
I knew that I couldn’t trust the internet long ago. I learned this from my first novel, Kansas; I based much of my own editing of Kansas off what I discovered from the internet. I took a lesson from this website and another from that, until there was no uniform punctuation or grammar at all. In short, the style in Kansas became a hodgepodge of various individual and institutional lessons taken from all over the web.
I cannot stress the importance of maintaining good style as a writer. After the lesson of Kansas, I became a scholar of the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) and Webster’s New World Punctuation. I use the former as the definitive answer and the latter only when I can’t find it in the CMS. When I first opened these books, it was like opening my memory up to the days when Mrs. Berg taught me about the predicates of sentences and when to use an ellipse. These two references have shaped my personal style and made Maven and East all the better.
Now, back to that colon.
My editor was utilizing the colon as if it were a semicolon, joining two related ideas/sentences to each other. I broke out the CMS and verified such a use. In Section 6.63 it notes:
“A colon introduces an element or a series of elements illustrating or amplifying what has preceded the colon. Between independent clauses it functions much like a semicolon, though more strongly emphasizing sequence. The colon may be used instead of a period to introduce a series of related sentences . . .”
The CMS goes on to list other uses of the colon, including its use in dialogue. But for my editor’s choice, it was to use it to combine two related, sequential sentences. I’m sure Mrs. Berg would be proud to know that I haven’t forgotten her lessons, even if I had to be reminded of them by two, important books.
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