How to avoid overusing colons (p. 834)

While it is not unusual to see more than one semicolon in a sentence, using more than one colon per sentence should be avoided. How would you check your document for sentences with more than one colon?

1. Open the SEARCH (or FIND) feature of your word-processing program.
2. Type a colon (:) in the SEARCH field.
3. Run the search.

The program will stop at every instance of a colon in your document, letting you see how many you've actually used and decide if you're using too many in a single sentence.