I found this very informative.
http://m.nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence
Strangely, I don’t think I do. Actually, it’s probably my formality in textual communication that’s strange: I tend to reject formality in most areas.
Me neither. I’d be interested in learning stuff like that, if there’s anything on it. Surely there is, but I wouldn’t know how to start searching for it.
What made you decide to use a colon here?
If you were speaking instead of writing, would you have known that particular pause would be followed by an explanation before you actually formulated the explanation? Or is this something where you had a comma or period, then later decided a colon would help communicate the relationship between the two clauses better than simply speaking them could?
~Max
Is it correct to use a colon there or should it be a semi-colon?
That was very interesting. I suppose my formality in textual communication maybe isn’t actually as strange as I thought when I wrote my earlier post, though reading that article doesn’t change the fact that other people I’ve texted/IMed with have generally done so much less formally than I. It also applies to forums, Reddit, etc., but I think most people are a bit more formal in those contexts.
Tangent
Its title also reminded me of how I’ve noticed that Google’s grammar checker seems to be damaging the English language* by offering erroneous “corrections”, but that’ll have to be separate thread (once I find the short writeup I did on it).
*I’m not railing against linguistic evolution here. What I see is a unilateral action by a very powerful entity that’s (probably inadvertently) making the language less expressive and more confusing. Anyway, for another thread.
Tangential question unrelated to above tangent
Anybody know the name of the use of brackets/parentheses to show sentence structure, as shown in this parsing of the sentence from the US Declaration of Independence at the top of the Nautilus article? I thought it was “parenthetical language”, but that didn’t turn out to find anything related to it, last time I searched.
I think I thought to use the colon pretty early in formulating the sentence. I thought of what ideas I wanted to convey, and then the approximate sentence structure and wording, and then the colon just seemed to suggest itself there.
If I was speaking, I might have used something like “because” instead, or split it into two sentences, but I think the overall structure would have been similar.
I think it’s a valid use of a colon. But I would, wouldn’t I?: I wouldn’t’ve used it if I thought it was incorrect.
It isn’t the only grammatically correct option there, though: a semicolon would be fine, as would an em dash. Their meanings would be subtly different, though: in a context like this, the colon implies “because” more strongly than the others do—probably because the others have more other uses.
I used three colons in the above two paragraphs; are their meanings all clear?