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When reading Greek texts at school, pupils are confronted with long sentences and a variable word order. In this article I argue that we can help our pupils by presenting the text in a different layout, divided into cola, short meaningful sections of text. Ancient grammarians, both Greek and Latin, already used this concept in discussing texts, but they hardly gave any criteria to determine where one colon ends and the next begins. Eduard Fraenkel, Kenneth Dover and Frank Scheppers have demonstrated that we can indeed determine colon boundaries. Based on these criteria I have analysed two passages of Greek and tried to show how our pupils could benefit from a layout in cola. The sections they have to deal with are much shorter, and they will – hopefully – learn to appreciate the word order an author has chosen. In the final section I will link this colometric reading of the text with theory on word order, based on a functional approach.