Should I put colons with second-level titles?
I'm writing a documentation for an eGovernment project, so the document I'm writing is a scientific document. It contains some big ideas, each having some subideas, with each subidea having a number of paragraphs.
The question is that at the title of each subidea (wich contains only paragraphs, no free text), should I put colons?
The paragraphs contain explanations sometimes, so should I put colons for the paragraphs' titles?
This is an example:
Motivating People
Reputation System
Needs for reputation system
It's needed due to several reasons (so mentioning the reasons).Mechanism
The system works as follows: (so mentioning how it works).Trust System
.......
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2 answers
I would say that you do not need colons with your subheadings (the headings above your sub-ideas).
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5455. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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First off, if you're writing for the government they might have a format they expect, so if so and it says something on this point, it wins.
Otherwise, I would not use colons in any of your titles or paragraphs. The colon's job is to introduce what follows (e.g. in a list), but a title/subtitle/subsubtitle/etc structure already provides that implicitly.
The one case where I would use a colon in a title is in a document title that has a subtitle, e.g. "A History of the McGuffin: A Literature Survey". But I would prefer to represent all of that as the title, not title + subtitle, so I would only do that if a style guide forced me to separate the elements.
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