How To Use A Colon In An Essay

Whether to use colons in titles

In Eloquent Science, I discuss my thoughts well-nigh colons in titles of scientific manufactures on pp. 24-25, but only briefly. Dave Mechem (Academy of Kansas) emailed me to express business organization nigh their overuse in some disciplines like geography, humanities, and some of the social sciences.

For an instance, take a wait at this issue of Progress in Man Geography. Of the 9 scientific articles, all just 1 use a colon in the title. Two fifty-fifty use a colon and an em dash! Practice people in these disciplines have more to say in the titles than us in the concrete sciences? I don't know. Information technology certainly seems commonplace, if not nearly mandatory in those disciplines.

By comparison, atmospheric science (likewise as the other physical sciences) tend not to accept as many titles with colons in them. Peter Thrower, the long-time editor of the journal Carbon, wrote an editorial derogatorily calling titles with unnecessary colons in them colonic titles. (If that joke doesn't make sense to you, check out this definition of colonic.)

Colons, like annihilation, lose their novelty and effectiveness when overused. Titles with colons often make the titles longer and cutsier than necessary. Of my roughly 80 published papers, I take used a colon or a two-phrase title fourteen times, and merely 4 of those cases was I the pb author. Here are some of those titles.

Historical research in the atmospheric sciences: The value of literature reviews, libraries, and librarians.

Castellanus and elevated convection: Ambiguities, significance, and questions.

Maintaining the office of humans in the forecast process. Analyzing the psyche of skillful forecasters.

False alarms and close calls: A conceptual model of warning accurateness.

The mysteries of mammatus clouds: Observations and germination mechanisms.

Toward improved prediction: High-resolution and ensemble modeling systems in operations.

Field significance revisited: Spatial bias errors in forecasts every bit practical to the Eta model.

The utilize of moisture flux convergence in forecasting convective initiation: Historical and operational perspectives.

The 1993 Superstorm cold surge: Frontal structure, gap menses, and tropical affect.

The March 1993 Superstorm cyclogenesis: Incipient stage synoptic- and convective-scale menstruation interaction and model functioning.

Two cases had trivial uses of the colon.

Evolution of the U.Due south. tornado database: 1954–2004.

Climatology of severe hail in Finland: 1930–2006.

In only two cases, I might have pushed some people's buttons as the title might accept been perceived equally too cutsy or unnecessary. For those cases, I was trying to be a fiddling more provocative.

Are iii heads better than 2? How the number of reviewers and editor behavior impact the rejection rate.

Weekly precipitation cycles? Lack of evidence from Usa surface stations.

Looking dorsum, I recall that most of my colonic titles were not excessively long, and the 2d part of the title after the colon amplified the first office. And so, I thought these titles were more often than not effective. Sure, many of them could take been written as a single phrase, but then what I wanted to emphasize as the first role would have necessarily been subservient in a revised title. (Writing the Superstorm titles without the colon merely trying to go along the give-and-take "Superstorm" early in the title is a challenge.)

If an author vowed to never employ colons in his titles, I would support that person 100%. Merely, I would too support others' power to use them in a limited and specific sense.