I Despise Colons

As you may have noticed from previous posts, I have a lot of strong feelings about punctuation. I do a little happy dance every time someone uses an em dash or semicolon. Knowing when to use a comma is like finally being in a stable relationship. A good question mark never hurt anyone (unless it follows the phrase, "will you give me that $100 you owe me?"). But there is one piece of punctuation that I can never get behind. And that, my friends, is the colon.

I mean, just look at it. Is that not the ugliest piece of grammar you've ever seen? It's atrocious. It's like someone had a basket of extra periods and just flung them around the page willy-nilly. If grammar had celebrity counterparts, Jillian Michaels would be the colon. And she's just plain scary.

Up until this point, I could kind of ignore the colon and pretend it never existed. However, my English professor loves colons. It got to the point where he would look at an em dash on my paper, raise his eyebrow, and go "why isn't this a colon?" And I'd be all "because my reader is not an idiot, and I don't feel the need to announce every time I'm about to present idea." Except I didn't, because, y'know, grades.

When I begrudgingly revised and slapped a few colons onto my essay, my professor actually drew a heart next to each colon. A grown man loves this punctuation so much, it's made him transform into a teenage girl.

Seriously though! Can someone please explain to me what is so likeable about the colon? Perhaps it's organized and is all "hey guys, here's a list of important things, please stop playing Angry Birds and listen up," but the Nazis were organized too, and they went ahead and slaughtered 6 million Jews.

So what we should take away from this is that every colon is a Nazi. Glad you're coming with me on this one.

Think back to when you were in third grade and had to present a report on dogs. You'd be all "I like dogs. This is why I like dogs: they're cute. They're cuddly. They're nice to me." That is what the colon does. It makes you look like you're a third grader who cannot combine ideas. 

Colons make it impossible to make an essay flow. It's alarming. And honestly, you're just gonna let your reader down. Your essay is going "hey, reader, hey. A really great idea is coming up. Hold onto your hats, you're going to be blown away by this idea!" And then they read the idea and they're all "that was a mediocre idea." They'd probably be thinking it was a good idea if that stupid colon didn't get their hopes up!

The colon is the grammatical equivalent of getting a really ugly sweater from your Aunt Tina. You cringe a little and say "oh that's nice," while secretly wishing to slash every ugly sweater in the universe.

So for the love of all things grammatical, please stop using colons. It's hurting our future as writers. It's hurting our reputations. The colon is killing our souls.

Namaste.