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Punctuation

The period or full stop

The comma

Connecting clauses

Lists in a sentence

Separating lists of adjectives

Parenthetical phrases

Introductory phrases

Quotation marks

Using single quotation marks

The exclamation mark or exclamation point

The question mark

The colon

When to capitalise after a colon

The semicolon

The apostrophe

Making words plural using apostrophes

The hyphen

Dividing words at the end of a line

Using hyphens to create compound numbers

Using hyphens to avoid confusion

Using hyphens to join words together to form adjectival phrases

Using hyphens with prefixes

Using hyphens for position descriptions

The em and en dash

Parentheses

Brackets

The forward slash

To indicate choice between multiple options

For dates

Fractions

The ellipsis or dot dot dot

The colon

A colon is what you put in a sentence before a list or an explanation of something. However, it can only come after an independent clause.

You can also use a colon to separate an independent clause from a quote that it introduces:

In his famous paper on vegetable soup, Marcus raised this point: "If we don’t eat enough vegetables, they will get lonely."

Scripts for plays or movies use a colon after every person’s name to indicate what that person should say. No quotation marks are usually used.

Click here to move on to the next topic: When to capitalise after a colon