A trail of colons?

Question

I find I often, when writing, want to string colons together. Here is a recent example: >These two moments would be likely candidates for retelling: they both connect the people of San Andrés Tuxtla to great civilizations: the pre-Hispanic Olmec and the Spanish, when they were at the height of their power. Now, fret ye not! I eventually replaced the first colon with a period. I find, however, that after using one colon I often want to use another. Of course, this could just be my own little grammatical quirk. Maybe I find colons a little like Lay's and can't have just one. I am curious, though, if there is any grammatical or linguistic explanation for this desire? Does a colon regularly induce a sentence or clause that also seeks a colon?

Answer 1

Ha ha! I love your humor on the subject. Alas, a sentence should only have one colon. This is because a colon should be preceded by an independent clause. While it's possible to have more than one independent clause in a sentence, this should be done with a comma and conjunction or a semicolon. It's difficult to do this smoothly with a colon. The colon indicates a greater stop before you introduce a list, a grand idea, or a quote. Here are a few examples:

1. The recipe includes the following ingredients: flour, eggs, butter, and sugar.
2. I thought for a few moments before I realized it was true: I had been lied to all along.
3. In the Crazy Rich Asians series, Kevin Kwan uses the character of Carton Bao to show how there is a rift between Asians from different countries and upbringings: "I can't really relate to the Chinese back home. In Shanghai, I'm see as too Westernized. Here in Singapore, I'm seen as an uncivilized Mainlander."

Because the colon indicates a greater stop than a comma would, it doesn't quite work to continue the sentence after it. It's best to start a new sentence and use colons sparingly. I'm not sure why you have the desire to do this - perhaps you saw it somewhere and the style appealed to you? I have a tendency to write in sets of three (see above three examples), so we each have our own writing quirks!