what were the smart people thinking?
ok, so i was attempting to learn something about grammar (because on the CSAP last year mine was awefull) and i hit a roadblock. the definition explaining how to USE a certain part of grammar is more confusing then the dictionary!!! here is whaty i got when searching for how to use a colon: (yes, i just used one, but i dont know if i should have at all!)
- syntactical-deductive: introduces the logical consequence, or effect, of a fact stated before
- syntactical-descriptive: introduces a description; in particular, explicits the elements of a set
- appositive: introduces a sentence with the role of apposition with respect to the previous one
- segmental: introduces a direct speech, in combination with quotation marks and dashes.
This last was once a common means of indicating an unmarked quotation on the same line (from the Fowlers’ grammar book, The King’s English)
- Benjamin Franklin proclaimed the virtue of frugality:— A penny saved is a penny earned.
A colon may also be used for the following:
- introduction of a definition
- A: the first letter in the Latin alphabet
- Hypernym of a word: a word having a wider meaning than the given one; e.g. vehiclecar is a hypernym of
- separation of the chapter and the verse number(s) indication in many references to religious scriptures, and also epic poems; it was also used for chapter numbers in roman numerals
- John 3:14–16 (or John iii:14–16) (cf. chapters and verses of the Bible)
- The Qur’an, Sura 5:18
- separation when reporting time of the day (cf. ISO 8601)
- The concert finished at 23:45
- This file was last modified today at 11:15:05
- separation of a title and the corresponding subtitle
- separation of clauses in a periodic sentence
In English, a colon may be followed either by a capital letter or by a lower case letter, as the author prefers (unless a capital letter is necessary for a proper noun).[citation needed] No particular consistency is required within a given text, although it is assumed that use of both capital letters and lower case letters after colons, in a single given text, would serve some purpose in communicating the author’s desired meaning, rather than simply reflecting carelessness.
WHAT THE HECK DOES THAT MEAN!? the explainer automatically asumes that i know what all kinds of things used in the explanation are. i dont. i wonder if the have grammar for dummies…
on February 22nd, 2007 at 7:32 am
You are absolutely right to question how obtuse most grammarians are in their definitions of punctuation, parts of speech, and sentence types. I think the best thing you can do is to come up with your own rules based upon the context of examples. If you look only at the examples you have mentioned in your post, you could come up with rules that make sense to you. As long as you are thinking about how the words need to fit together, you will be fine. As for writing about this topic, I was very excited that you chose to write about grammar. I have written quite a bit about it myself (you can check my school website you actually want to read it), so it is nice to get some other points of view. However, you have identified a problem: wordy definitions that don’t help you understand what you want to understand. You should also identify a solution. Propose your own definitions; see what sticks.