Saturday, February 27: Mississippi Mud
COLONIZATION
by John M. Floyd
One thing I try to do is read while thinking like a writer and write while thinking like a reader. It doesn’t always work, but I try. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that most of us writers seem to use too much punctuation in our fiction.
Some marks of punctuation — periods, commas, question marks, apostrophes, quotation marks — will always be used a lot, because they’re always necessary. Others, not so much. And I feel qualified to criticize, here, because I myself am probably more guilty than most. I happen to love colons, semicolons, and dashes, and their relatives as well, but I’m working hard to cut back to only several a day. The simple truth is that while the overuse of anything in fiction can be a problem, the overuse of things like colons, semicolons, parentheses, ellipses, dashes, exclamation points, etc., can quickly become distracting.
In the case of colons and semicolons, overuse can also make your writing appear too stiff and formal — especially within dialogue. (Remember, I’m talking only about overuse, and only about fiction. Non-fiction is, pardon the pun, another story.)
You colon me paranoid?
I probably am. But hey, distraction of any kind isn’t something we as writers want the reader to experience, when he or she reads our stories. Especially our crime/suspense stories. We want the writing to flow smoothly and at a good pace, with as few interruptions as possible.
One thing that can help is a word-processor “search” for certain punctuation marks after a fiction manuscript is finished. (A general colon prowl?) If you then confirm that a colon or semicolon that you’ve used is the best choice, fine. Keep it. Otherwise, consider substituting a period or comma, or even rephrase the sentence a bit.
As I mentioned earlier, I actually like using colons. I think it’s because the colon is a mark that signals expectation. When I run into a colon while reading a story, I can be pretty sure something significant is coming up next. It might be items in a list, an emphatic thought or statement, even a surprise. And I like to write that way. Again, though, colons are like mosquitoes, or hardshell Baptists — they get irritating when there are too many around.
Friday the 13th Part XVI: Jason Re-Bourne
One of my pet peeves is the use of colons in the titles of novels, short stories, and screenplays. I’m convinced, due to extensive research (usually while seated in a movie theater with an overpriced bag of popcorn in one hand and a overpriced ticket stub in the other), that inserting a colon into the title of a work of fiction is often not a good thing.
Of the many, many movies I’ve seen that have colon-bearing titles, I can recall only a few that turned out to be worthwhile. Among them are Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan. There are others, of course, but not a lot. I won’t even mention the really pitiful ones here — you know the ones I mean.
Found: The Adventures of a Castaway Who Sighted a Cruise Ship
Even non-fiction titles that feature a colon — and that’s most of them, these days — can be annoying. It’s as if the writer always follows the colon with information that explains at length what the book (or article) is about. I always sort of feel that the author’s talking down to me, that he thinks I wouldn’t have enough gumption to be able to figure out the subject of the book from a simpler, shorter, uncolonized title. (Who knows, maybe if the writer tried harder to come up with an appropriate title, a long translation/explanation wouldn’t be required.)
Thankfully, colons don’t usually show up in the titles of novels or short stories. Could it be that readers are smarter than film-goers, so there’s not as much need to spell everything out? Certainly there are fewer sequels in printed matter than in screened matter, and most movie titles with colons are sequels (including two of the examples I gave earlier).
A colon reduction procedure
Here’s a thought: Save up most of the colons and semicolons you remove from your fiction and use them later in academic papers, legal briefs, and technical manuals.
Nobody understands those anyway.
>(A general colon prowl?)
Capital! You’ve made my day.
After your vowel movement observation, I’m starting to worry, John.
You’re right, Leigh, vowel shift does sound a lot better, especially the day before a column about colon issues.
By the way, last night I discovered an unusual use of a colon in a reference to a recent book —
EDGAR SAWTELLE: A NOVEL
Alimentary, my dear Watson.
Among other abuses of the colon, I have observed a recent tendency that when two independent clauses are separated by a colon, to capitalize the first letter of the second clause as if it were a separate sentence. E.g.,
Not all mystery-themed websites deal with novels: The purpose of Criminal Brief, for example, is to advocate the reading of crime-oriented short stories.
instead of
Not all mystery-themed websites deal with novels: the purpose of Criminal Brief, for example, is to advocate the reading of crime-oriented short stories.
The former is wrong. The insertion of the colon makes it a single sentence, and only the first word in a sentence is capitalized (except for proper nouns, like “Criminal Brief”). If the two clauses were separated by a period, on the other hand, it would be correct to capitalize the “T” in “the”:
Not all mystery-themed websites deal with novels. The purpose of Criminal Brief, for example, is to advocate the reading of crime-oriented short stories.
So why use a colon at all? It has to do with whether there are two thoughts being expressed, each deserving of its own sentence, or only one thought, where the second clause amplifies or is introduced by the first. Good prose style, of course, requires a “topic sentence” when one is writing in paragraphs—all the sentences following the topic sentence should amplify it. But if one isn’t writing in paragraphs, or if the rest of the paragraph deals exclusively with how Criminal Brief advocates short stories, in which case the second clause rather than the first is the actual topic, then using the colon may be preferable.
JLW, I’ve heard several writers and instructors say that capitalizing the first word of a complete sentence that follows a colon is optional. Patricia T. O’Connor, in WOE IS I, says, “If what comes after a colon is a complete sentence, you may start it with a capital or a lowercase letter. I use a capital when I want to be more emphatic. (My advice is this: Bring only one next time.) This is a matter of taste, and opinions differ. Whatever your choice, be consistent.”
If anybody is interested in what Fowler has to say about it, here’s his take, complete with the soft ironic humor that is one of his trademarks:
“As long as the Prayer-Book version of the Psalms continues to be read, the colon is not likely to pass quite out of use as a stop, chiefly as one preferred by individualists, or in impressive contexts, to the semicolon; but the time when it was the second member of the hierarchy, full stop, colon, semicolon, comma, is past; in general usage, it is not now a stop of certain power available in any situation demanding such a power, but has acquired a special function, that of delivering the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words; it is a substitute for such verbal harbingers as viz, scil., that is to say, i.e., &c.”
In case you’re wondering, viz is an abbreviation for the Latin videlicet (“it is plain to see (that)”) and scil. is an abbreviation of the Latin scilicet (“one may be sure (that)”).
Well, John, I consider O’Connor’s view as something of a cop out. If you’re going to capitalize the beginning of second clause, the colon is utterly superfluous.
Thanks for that quote. I like Fowler’s take on it. Rather than a full stop, it’s sort of a stop and watch for what’s coming next . . .
I’m with JLW regarding O’Connor and Colon: the Case of the Optional Upper Case. But it strikes me that the example O’Connor gives is demonstrating something altogether different from what she is describing: it is a quotation without quotation marks. When a sentence appears in quotes within another sentence, the quote is usually capitalized. (As in She said, “Capitalization is optional.”
O’Connor’s example (provided my John) strikes me as grammatically correct, with or without quotation marks. By putting quote marks in, you can see that capitalizing makes sense because she is quoting her advice, not because it is an independent sentence.
Steve, you’re right. The example she gave, and which I passed on, seems to demonstrate a quotation without quotation marks. But her position is that any complete sentence that follows a colon might or might not be capitalized, depending on whether the author wants to give it more emphasis.
I too believe that the rule is as JLW stated it, but I do tend to break those hard-and-fast rules sometimes (as in comma splices, split infinitives, sentence fragments, etc.) if it seems and feels right to do so.
And the beat goes on . . .
John, I here brag, I have a song parody called “Parentheses” which is on the AmIRight song parody website. If you check it out, it has my old, no longer valid e-mail address. But the song is still fun!