Reply #5: Advice from the grey matter at Swarthmore...

[Hugin]

"Avoid titles with colons: if at all possible. They are a tad pretentious. They are also, on average, longer than a normal title (Lewison and Hartley 2006) so they typically take longer to read (which asks more of the viewer and so is generally undesirable). Coloned titles are sometimes devised in order to inject humor into an otherwise mind-numbing poster topic (e.g., "Mind-numbingly boring: brain MRIs of bored versus anesthetized adolescents," "Attack of the Crohn's: contribution of chromosome 16 allelic variants to inflammatory bowel disease progression," or "Colonectomies: making your titles less annoying"). The other motivation for using colons is to provide greater detail about the general topic introduced by the first clause, which is purposefully vague so as to interest a wider viewership (e.g., "Causes of obesity: additive effects of inactivity and ad libitum feeding on yearly weight gain in Homo sapiens"). Although humor and clarity are great, it is better to achieve them without a grammatical crutch. If you absolutely must have a coloned title, just be sure it's not overly silly and that it doesn't force you to spill onto a third line. And lest you think I'm the only one on the planet who thinks colons are annoying: please conduct this search. (By the way, in recent years I have seen the rise of titles with two colons: these are even clunkier: the reasons are really, really obvious.)"


"Avoid titles with colons: if at all possible." <-- This is hilarious. They just used it to tell
the reader *NOT* to use it! LOL! :rofl:


http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/posteradvice.htm

Anyway, nothing there about what it's called. :shrug: