WNW: Colons, Commas, Parentheses, Oh, my!

Can you believe it? Word Nerd Wednesday is BACK!

After an unscheduled hiatus . . . ahem . . .

First, a link over to my Good Things Utah interview that aired live this morning.

CLICK HERE to watch my tongue go so fast that it's surprising that smoke isn't coming out of my mouth! (Oh, and to see an actual Flat Daddy of a currently deployed solider.)

Today we're tackling several questions Rebecca recently asked in a comment:

#1: Where do I put the comma, before the parentheses or after?

Simple answer: AFTER.

Parentheses let you add something in the middle of a sentence, an aside or clarification. Because of that, the sentence must be able to stand on its own if you pull the parentheses out. Take this sentence:

After Officer Brad spoke to the students (the fifth and sixth graders), he passed out information about Internet safety.

The clarifying addition of saying exactly which students were there helps, but it's not necessary for the sentence to make sense. You could just as easily say:

After Officer Brad spoke to the students, he passed out information about Internet safety.

But if the comma is inside the parentheses, then the comma is part of the insertion. Take it out, and the comma gets cut too. It's lost from the entire sentence, which makes for a long, convoluted line to read:

After Officer Brad spoke to the students he passed out information about Internet safety.

Definitely want that comma in there. Put it OUTSIDE the parentheses.

MINOR CONFUSION: This makes perfect sense, right? Well, not everything does. When you're dealing with quotation marks, you almost always put the commas or other punctuation INSIDE, even if they aren't part of the quote.

Gotta love how consistently random American English is.

#2: Do you capitalize the "n" in "not"?

Short answer: NO.

I'm assuming this refers to what to capitalize in titles. DO capitalize:

• All verbs, no matter how small (even IS, WAS, etc.)
• All nouns, pronouns, and proper names (CAR, THEM, HE, JUDY)
• The first and last word, regardless of what they are.
• Really long prepositions (at least 5 letters, such as WITHOUT, AGAINST, BENEATH)

Do NOT capitalize:

• Articles (THE, A, AN)
• Prepositions, unless they're long (ON, BY, INTO, OUT, etc)
• Short words (AND, IF, etc.)

Hence some of my titles:

Lost Without You

Three words, so the first and last get caps. The middle word is a preposition, but it's long, so it gets caps too.

At the Water's Edge

Cap at even though it's a preposition, because it's the first word. Don't cap the. Cap the other two big words.

House on the Hill

Only the first and last words get it, because the middle two are a preposition and an article.

Spires of Stone

First and last. The middle word is too small to matter.

See how that works? Pretty simple.

#3 When using colons, do you capitalize the first word that comes after them?
Generally speaking, no.

Whatever comes after a colon is still part of the same sentence, so you continue as you would with any other part of a sentence, in lowercase:

Mark read over his grocery list: bread, eggs, cheese, and a case of Sprite.

Sometimes writers will add an uppercase letter after a colon for a specific effect, or if the what comes after can stand by itself as a sentence. In the last case, the capped letter isn't needed. One exception would be this very post. Sometimes I'll lead into an example with a colon, but that's pretty much ending the sentence, and I'm beginning something brand new with the example sentence.

#4: When do you use actual numbers such as 12:00 versus twelve o'clock?
That's largely up to the publisher. I've seen it both ways, and which you use is really up to your editor and what style guide they're using. Neither is incorrect.

I personally prefer to spell out times, because numbers pull me out of the text and remind me that I'm reading, while words feel more natural and keep me in the story world. But that's just me.