<p>Is the following sentence grammatically correct?</p>
<p>Suddenly, the store owner rushed past me, his voice rising in anger as he enunciated all five letters in the word: scram. </p>
<p>If not, how can I correct the mistake without losing the tone and voice of the sentence?</p>
<p>I might be wrong but im pretty sure when I was half awake in english class one day, my teacher said after a colon you are not supposed to use quotes.</p>
<p>The sentence is OK, but you don't really need the quotes.</p>
<p>So is this correct then?</p>
<p>Suddenly, the store owner rushed past me, his voice rising in anger as he enunciated all five letters in the word: scram.</p>
<p>My friend had been telling me that there was a problem with the colon, but I couldn't figure out why it was wrong.</p>
<p>get rid of the colon and the quotes. the word scram is not a direct quote. you are only describing how he said the word scram.</p>
<p>Yeah. You really don't need the colon. You have the sentence set up kind of oddly. I think you can do it, grammatically, but I wouldn't.</p>
<p>Is there any way you could break it up? like... Suddenly, the store owner rushed past me. His voice rose in anger as he enunciated all five letters in the word scram. Same sentence, just not as hard to read.</p>
<p>I don't think the sentence is gramatically correct because it isn't clear whether the stuff after the second comma contains dependent or independent clause(s).</p>
<p>Suggestion:
Suddenly, the store owner rushed past me, with his voice rising in anger as he enunciated all five letters in the word <i>scram</i>.</p>
<p>Just lose the colon. You don't need any punctuation there, but you do need the quotation marks. I don't remember how to state the rule using grammatic jargon, but I know for a fact that you have to use quotes when you state a phrase in the form "the word 'x' "</p>