The Colon

You might be surprised to learn that the colon is one of the most helpful and easiest to use of all the punctuation marks. You don’t need to remember six or seven rules to understand how a colon works. In prose, a colon really does only one thing: it introduces. It can introduce just about anything: a word, a phrase, a sentence, a quotation, or a list. You’ll notice that we’ve used colons in the second case. This is how simple the colon is. Let’s look at some other examples:

Joe has only one thing on his mind: profit.

Joe has only one thing on his mind: his stock portfolio.

Joe has only one thing on his mind: he wants to get rich.

Joe has three things on his mind: stocks, bonds, and certificates of deposit.

We have used a colon in these four sentences to introduce various kinds of things: a word, a phrase, a sentence, and a list. You can use a colon in your prose in any place where you must directly introduce something. A colon gives special emphasis to whatever you’re introducing because readers must first come to a stop, and so they pay more attention to it. For example, let’s say you are writing a letter describing a product, and you want to emphasize above all that this product, the Jacobsen lawn mower, is reliable. You could very well write:

The Jacobsen lawn mower beats its competitors especially in the key area of reliability.

While this sentence gets the point across, it doesn’t place much emphasis on reliability. A sentence using a colon is much more emphatic:

The Jacobsen lawn mower beats its competitors especially in one key area: reliability.

Notice that the second example places clear emphasis on the point that the writer is trying to communicate to his or her reader: that the Jacobsen lawn mower is above all reliable. The writer of this sentence has used the colon effectively.

Perhaps the most common way to use a colon is to introduce a list of items, as in this sentence: