[Editor’s desk] Controlling colons and dodging bullets

One of the issues I find most frequently when editing TTRPG books is overuse of colons.

It’s a handy punctuation mark, to be sure, but people tend to scatter them around.

Principle: a colon leaves a sentence open. You have to close it with a full stop (period).

The longer you take to close the sentence, the more likely the reader’s brain gets lost trying to navigate and make sense of the text. So you want to avoid leaving sentences hanging.

The biggest issue, probably, is with bullet lists. These are a piece of layout technology used to help readers make sense of items of information. As TTRPG creators we tend to use them a lot. But to get them right, you need to understand that there are two types.

Bullets version 1

That’s applying layout tools to a standard text list that would go as follows.

With such short list items you probably wouldn’t use bullets at all, but you can see the illustration. It’s a single sentence split up by bullets, and the colon is part of its structure. If the list items were longer or more complex, you’d use semicolons between them to make the separation clearer.

Note that each bullet begins with a small letter, because it’s not a new sentence. To a degree that’s a style preference, but it’s a logical one. I like to end the last bullet with a stop to preserve the structure and show the sentence has ended. That helps readers to know that the content after the list is separate.

Bullets version 2

A horribly contrived example — but you can see that this format, rather than showing ideas or points within a sentence, shows connected ideas across several sentences.

Each bullet is a sentence in its own right. There is no colon leading into them. You don’t need it, because you’re not breaking a sentence.

You do need a short introduction so that the reader knows what the list is about. Where people go wrong is using a version 1 introduction with a version 2 list. Here’s what often happens.

You can see that hanging colon leading to items that are complete sentences means the introducing sentence never gets closed.

Also, items in a version 2 list are more likely to be long and contain their own punctuation (maybe even more colons). You need them to be neatly self-contained and separate, so the reader doesn’t get confused about where the flow of the text has gone.

I think people have an aversion to putting things simply. You can just say, for instance, ‘Here are the options.’ Or even, ‘This trait has a number of options.’ Readers are capable of realising that the list of bullets relates to what you just said.

A really common one is, ‘Choose an option from the following: … ‘. Try to get used to avoiding this. You could use, ‘Options are as follows.’ But that sounds a bit formal and stuffy, so a simple statement might be better for saying what you’re showing us.

Further colonary arts

These are the main uses for colons.

• Introduce a proposition in the part before the colon and resolve, clarify or expand it in the part after.
• Introduce a quotation, or a text list (see above).

Semicolons are less strong punctuation — like a comma with more of a pause to it. They can help to break up lists that might be a confusing sea of commas (though maybe you’d be better presenting that another way).

Colons are never followed by a capital in British English — unless that word brings its own capital with it, like an acronym or proper noun. US English does add capitals (and it looks awful, come on guys). Different well-known style guides have different conventions for when to do this, for instance if what follows the colon could stand as sentence on its own. This is one of the things you want to make explicit in your project’s style guide, so everyone can use it consistently.

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