• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This much is clear, Watson: it was the baying of an enormous hound.

(This much is clear, Watson – yes! it was the baying of an enormous hound.)

Tom has only one rule in life: never eat anything bigger than your head.

(Tom had only one rule in life – yes! never eat anything bigger than your head.)

I pulled out all the stops with Kerry-Anne: I used a semicolon.

(I pulled out all the stops with Kerry-Anne – yes! I used a semicolon.)

But the “annunciatory” colon is only one variety. As well as the “Yes!” type colon, there is the “Ah” type, when the colon reminds us there is probably more to the initial statement than has met the eye:

I loved Opal Fruits as a child: no one else did.

(I loved Opal Fruits – ah, but nobody else did.)

You can do it: and you will do it.

(You can do it – ah, and you will do it.)

A classic use of the colon is as a kind fulcrum between two antithetical or oppositional statements:

Man proposes: God disposes.

And as Shaw put it so well, the colon can simply pull up the reader for a nice surprise:

I find fault with only three things in this story of yours, Jenkins: the beginning, the middle and the end.

So colons introduce the part of a sentence that exemplifies, restates, elaborates, undermines, explains or balances the preceding part. They also have several formal introductory roles. They start lists (especially lists using semicolons):

In later life, Kerry-Anne found there were three qualities she disliked in other people: Britishness; superior airs; and a feigned lack of interest in her dusting of freckles.

They set off book and film sub-titles from the main titles:

Berks and Wankers: a pessimist’s view of language preservation

Gandhi II: The Mahatma Strikes Back

Conventionally, they separate dramatic characters from dialogue:

PHILIP: Kerry-Anne! Hold still! You’ve got some gunk on your face!

KERRY-ANNE: They’re freckles, Philip. How many more times?

They also start off long quotations and (of course) introduce examples in books on punctuation. What a useful chap the colon is, after all. Forget about counting to three, that’s all I ask.

So when do you use a semicolon? As we learned in the comma chapter, the main place for putting a semicolon if you are not John Updike is between two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as “and” or “but”, and where a comma would be ungrammatical:

I loved Opal Fruits; they are now called Starburst, of course.

It was the baying of an enormous hound; it came from over there!

I remember him when he couldn’t write his own name on a gate; now he’s Prime Minister.

What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist? In each of the examples above, a dash could certainly be substituted for the semicolon without much damage to the sentence. The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive; it enhances conversational tone; and, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is capable of quite subtle effects. The main reason people use it, however, is that they know you can’t use it wrongly – which, for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue. But it is worth learning the different effects created by the semicolon and the dash. Whereas the semicolon suggests a connection between the two halves of each of these sentences, the dash ought to be preserved for occasions when the connection is a lot less direct, when it can act as a bridge between bits of fractured sense:

I loved Opal Fruits – why did they call them Starburst? – reminds me of that joke “What did Zimbabwe used to be called? – Rhodesia. What did Iceland used to be called? – Bejam!”

So it is true that we must keep an eye on the dash – and also the ellipsis (. . .), which is turning up increasingly in emails as shorthand for “more to come, actually . . . it might be related to what I’ve just written . . . but the main thing is I haven’t finished