September 16, 2011

Colons, Capital Letters, and the Perfect Gelato

One benefit of learning grammar rules is knowing when you can make your own style decisions and still sound credible and professional.

An example is whether you capitalize the word after a colon, as in this sentence about “The Perfect Gelato.”

Mr. Palazzolo’s strawberry and cantaloupe flavors mimic the textures of the fruits themselves: Strawberry gelato is coarse but gives way under a spoon, while cantaloupe has the smoothness of cut melon.

It’s a little old fashioned to capitalize all first words after a colon, but the style is still widely used. In this case, you’d only need to remember to capitalize all ordinary nouns after a colon throughout your entire document.

This style also makes sense because a colon, like a period, is only correct inside a sentence when it follows a word group that could stand on its own as a complete sentence. If you can replace your colon with a period, you’re in the clear.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two lessons on punctuation marks, including the colon. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!