Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and today we're talking about colones.

And then we'll talk about words with no known origin.

The Mark of Expectation or Edition.

That's what one of my favorite old grammar books called punctuated right calls

the colon, because it signals that what comes next is directly related to the previous sentence.

Often it's almost a definition of what came before. How you use a colon depends on which

style guide you follow, and it can be tricky because in some cases, the styles differ a lot.

The first thing you have to decide is whether to capitalize the first word after the colon.

In both Associated Press style and Chicago style, you capitalize the first word after a colon whenever what comes next is a complete

sentence. Squiggly has one dream colon. He wants to become a chocolatier. The part after the colon

defines Squiggly's dream. And the way it's written, the word he is

capitalized because it starts a complete sentence.

And if the part that comes after the colon isn't a complete sentence, keep the first word

lowercase.

Squiggly has one dream, colon, becoming a chocolatier, with a lowercase B in becoming.

Simple, right? Sure, until we get to the MLA handbook from the Modern Language Association,

a style often used by people in the humanities. In other words, if you're in high school or college,

you might use it to write your papers,

and it has a particularly tricky style when it comes to colon's.

In MLA style, you only capitalize the first word after a colon if it starts more than one complete sentence,

or if it's a question.

So you'd keep the word he lowercase in our previous

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