Introducing a paragraph that also contains colons
At work, sometimes I have to send people password reminders. Our experience shows that about half the time when people think they don't remember their password, they're actually mistyping their login name, so our practice is to always send both. But I never know how to introduce it.
Your login credentials are:
Username: jsmith
Password: 123abc
That "doubled" colon just bugs the heck out of me. Is there a better way?
(And before you ask: yes, we send passwords as cleartext, and yes, that's secure enough for our purposes.)
I usually write:
Your credentials are as follows.
Username: jsmith
Password: 123abc
Or:
Please use the following credentials.
Username: jsmith
Password: 123abc
Of course, these rewordings still kind of ask for a colon, but at least they can handle a period at all, as opposed to "your credentials are".
You don’t necessarily need colons in the list.
My favorite form of the property/value list has right-aligned property names, two spaces, and left aligned values.
Your login credentials are:
Username jsmith
Password 123abc
Of course it looks better with more values.
Your login credentials are:
Domain Initech
Username jsmith
Password 123abc
Password Hint cba321 spelled backward
A simple table would also look nice, if you are already sending e-mails in rich text or HTML. (I tend to use plain text, but that’s just me.)