Great stuff Scott,

My current area of focus in growing as a screenwriter IS writing better lines of description.

Quick question, AND it's something I saw in the most recent "14 Days of Screenplays" how does a writer rationalize ending a line of description with a colon?

Pete cruised in slow. He wore the sap. He held his automatic. He saw:

Straight out of the "Harbrace College Handbook" you use a colon as a "formal introducer to call attention to what follows and as a mark of seperation in scriptural and time references and in certain titles."

Anyway if you'd be so king so as to justify the use of colon (:) at the END OF A LINE OF DESCRIPTION IN SCREENWRITING I'd be much obliged.

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

E.C.:

But seriously...

Most people don't look at screenwriting as an exercise that adheres to the rules of grammar as in essay-writing, for example. It is closer to the oral tradition. Therefore, it's conversational, and it's leading. The narrative must move the reader, and any technique that does so is fair game for use.

@E.C.
Your answer is in the formal definition you gave us. "to call attention to what follows ". In the example Scott gave us what follows the colon?
" Dirt streets. Dirt yards. Dirt lots. Shack chateaus abundant." Almost like poetry the way Elroy strings the consonants together. Easy, even satisfying to read and Visual...just what a reader wants.

Humble advice: don't get caught up in the grammatical rules of usage too much. Just tell the story. You get that, editing grammar will be easy.

Lee Matthias and Just_Hitz,

Thanks for the repsonse. Great feedback.

I just want to understand everything as pertains to screenwriting format. That's why I post questions like that. In the time I've been writing I've noticed a WIDE difference in form writer-to-writer. Bolded vs non-bolded master shot heading for instance, which was discussed in an earlier post.
Believe me, I'm not a big rules guy. If those writing the checks, and those grading in screenwriting competitions allow for varriances, I'm not going to complain. I just want to know what's acceptable and what isn't.

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

@E.C.: Lee and Just_Hiltz have it right by my view. When writing scene description, it's our job to entertain the reader (I'm talking about a selling script, not a shooting script). And if we need to break the rules of grammar to do it, so be it.

We need go no further than the dean of contemporary American screenwriting William Goldman who once wrote an action sequence [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid] as a 250+ word run-on sentence and made up the word "barrel-assed" as a verb in scene description -- all in the service of creating a visual and compelling narrative.

Like Lee said: "The narrative must move the reader, and any technique that does so is fair game for use."

And like what JH said: "Humble advice: don't get caught up in the grammatical rules of usage too much. Just tell the story. You get that, editing grammar will be easy."

Can I recommend Casino as a script to read? I know it's on dailyscript.com. Scorcese, DeNiro and Pesci obviously bring tons of energy to the table, but just read the first few pages of that script and see how wildly engaging it is.

[...] writing :: study these examples of descriptive elements from the screenplays of american beauty, the sixth sense, butch cassidy, [...]