Learn English – the correct punctuation after “as follows”?

colonperiodpunctuationsentence

I am consistently confused by by the usage of "as follows", in particular, I don't know if I should end "as follows" with a period, or with a colon.

Should I always use a colon, or can I sometimes use a period?

It feels more natural to use a colon, but I have only seen it in lists, but not sentences. For example, should I write:

  1. The description of each chapter is as follows: in chapter 1, we discuss the life story of Bill, and as we will see Bill grew up poor and had no family. In chapter 2, we will talk about how Bill became the richest man in New York. In chapter 3 we will talk about Bill's relationship with Jane. We have finished talking about all the chapters.

or

  1. The description of each chapter is as follows. In chapter 1, we discuss the life story of Bill, and as we will see Bill grew up poor and had no family. In chapter 2, we will talk about how Bill became the richest man in New York. In chapter 3, we will talk about Bill's relationship with Jane. We have finished talking about all the chapters.

    • The problem of using : to me is that the last sentence "we have
      finished talking…" is not a part of the chapters, but it feels that
      the colon also includes that sentence as a chapter, which feels wrong to
      me.

    • In fact, it feels that everything that comes after a colon is
      included in the list and the only way to signal to the reader you are
      no longer listing things is by starting a new paragraph, which is weird.

    • Also if you are listing many things, it feels that the : only
      includes the first thing, because you eventually have to put a period after it. If you were to replace the period with a comma, then you have created a run-on sentence.

What is the correct punctuation after "as follows"?

Best Answer

Semicolons to separate the chapters, as proposed in another answer, is certainly a valid approach. However, I'd like to answer from a different angle - one that comes from my experience with lists in technical writing, where they are very common.

First of all, the right punctuation after "as follows" is a colon. There's no way around that. "Follows" or "following" is the indicator. You could potentially get away with a period at the end of a sentence like "The following diagram illustrates the flow of X through Y." Even in this case, a colon is preferable. But if the lead-in actually ends with "as follows" or "the following", then a colon is the only option.

Regarding your question about whether the colon can introduce more than one sentence: Indeed it can. For example, here in this paragraph, it does. What I'm doing here is not the same as what you did in your example, though. Everything I'm saying is part of the same point. In your example, you actually have introduced a list, and each item in your list consists of a complete sentence, so the best way to present that would be as a bulleted or numbered list.

Incidentally, each of the items in the bulleted list would start with a capital letter, since it's a complete sentence. When you run into the first sentence directly from the lead-in, as I did in the previous paragraph, it's up to you (or the house style you're writing for) to decide whether to capitalise after the colon. I prefer to do so, but that isn't a binding rule.

Regarding your question about the last sentence, which isn't part of the chapters, I'm assuming that you know that the last sentence is unnecessary and that you've just used it as a (perhaps rather silly) example to raise the entirely valid question: "How do I indicate to the reader that this is no longer part of the stuff that followed the colon?" Your intuition is correct. A new paragraph is the way to do that, and there's nothing weird about it.

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