Grammarians include:

[lightcastle]

I have just been informed that current practice is that colons are only to follow independent clauses. In other words, one can no longer introduce a list by saying something like "Vancomyacin has many side effects, including:" (or even "These effects include:")

Has anyone else heard this? It seems a bizarre move unless we no longer believe in lists which may not be exhaustive.

Comments

[tablesaw]

Well, wouldn't you have a complete list of known side effects?

It's not really a move, it has been like this for quite a while now. All the style guides I have handy list it; the earliest is fifteen eyars old, but I suspect it'll be from earlier.

Colons are meant to be very strong punctuation, so they shouldn't get in between a verb or preposition and its objects. And, of course, lists can be nonexhaustive, but not all lists need colons.

This is, after all, a style question, not a grammatical one. This style guide just dictates whether a colon can be used in the sentence "Side effects may include joint pain, nausea, head-ache, or shortness of breath", not whether the sentence itself is grammatical.

[lightcastle]

It's more a case of what writing for multimedia has done. Visually, it is extremely useful to use a colon as an introduction to a bulleted list.

In thinking about it, I realize it has been this way for quite some time and that is how I normally use it in written text. It's just been so long since I've heard it articulated that when it was stated as the rule we've been violating, it seemed odd.

Of course, there ARE no punctuation rules that can't be overthrown, so if we decide that our style requires breaking this in terms of visual display, we will.