I thought a colon must be preceded by an independent clause.

________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Albert E. Krahn [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2015 4:00 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The problem is . . .

The problem with "The problem is"
is that it could be a colon situation.

"The problem is: I'm not attracted to him."

Putting a comma after "is" sends us back
a few centuries to rhetorical punctuation.
(Yes, I know, there are still some advocates
for rhetorical punctuation around, but they
may not last forever, I hope.)

"The problem is, I'm not attracted to him."
This amounts to a fragment and a sentence,
which makes no sense at all where the uses
of the comma are concerned. Today, the
thing looks like an ungrammatical orthographic
sentence.

Yes, the writer was rather lazy and could have
written it using a commplementizer.

"The problem is that I'm not attracted to him."

But the colon would provide an altermantive
way of dealing with it and also provide
more focus on the full sentence.


Albert E. Krahn, PhD
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
[log in to unmask]
www.punctuation.org
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