Colons for lists: Indian giant squirrel
The Grammar Bit!
Read the three scintillating list sentences opposite. You’ll remember from Year 2 that commas are used to separate individual items and actions in a list (apart from between the final two items or actions when the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ is commonly used instead).
Now that you are in Year 6, we can get a little bit more ‘sophisticated’ with our list sentence writing. Notice how a colon (:) has been used to introduce each list of items or actions. When using a colon in this way, each introductory clause (bold) should be able to stand alone as a main clause.
If the introductory clause cannot stand alone, it would be incorrect to interrupt the flow of it with a colon.
Example
(Incorrect) The natural predators of Indian giant squirrels are: leopards, crested serpent eagles and lion-tailed macaques.
(Correct) The Indian giant squirrel has a number of natural predators: leopards, crested serpent eagles and lion-tailed macaques.
Notice also how the words that follow the colon in each list do not start with a capital letter (unless, of course, they are proper nouns).
Scintillating Sentences
1) Jackfruit have several unusual characteristics: their texture is similar to chicken or pork, they are the largest tree-borne fruits in the world and, when ripe and unopened, they have a very unpleasant smell.
2) There are four subspecies of giant squirrel that can be found in south and southeastern Asia: the Indian giant squirrel, the grizzled giant squirrel, the cream-coloured giant squirrel and the black giant squirrel.
3) The following foods feature heavily in an Indian giant squirrel’s diet: fruit, flowers, nuts and tree bark.
![](https://www.naturalcurriculum.co.uk/app/uploads/2020/09/Picture1-398x295.png)
Did you know?
Fearful of predators on the ground, Indian giant squirrels prefer to stash uneaten nuts high up in the treetops rather than bury them underground.