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Q&A Should I put colons with second-level titles?

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...

posted 12y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T02:18:43Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5456
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T02:18:43Z (about 5 years ago)
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.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2012-04-17T18:58:41Z (over 12 years ago)
Original score: 4