dubbele punt – Advanced Dunglish

Habits such as: colons before lists

Dutch typography regularly seems to use a superfluous colon to introduce a list of items – sometimes even a ‘list’ of one!

English as she is spoken

The Dutch are great communicators who get their message across well in spoken English. But actually putting the spoken word on paper is a pig with a different snout altogether.

Arithmetic

Hold on, that’s the same in all languages… isn’t it?

Comma splices

Separate sentences shouldn’t be glued together with commas, this is poor style.

…he said (ten lines later).

Open quotes. Someone’s talking. Who? For a while. OK: who? More but from whom? Finally: close quotes at the end of the paragraph and we learn who said it.