Using em dashes

Em dashes—those honking big dashes people use to introduce a break in thought—are not preceded or followed by spaces. Nor does using two hyphens –– count as an em dash. For the record.

By Kim Siever

I am a copywriter and copyeditor. I blog on writing and social media tips mostly, but I sometimes throw in my thoughts about running a small business. Follow me on Twitter at @hotpepper.

5 comments

  1. Kim, I know that you are a grammar guy as I am too, although a mere yearling in comparison. I have read a number of sources that indicate that a double hyphen *may* be used when there is no typographical way to represent the dash. For instance, if I were to use a dash in this comment I would *have no way* to represent it as most blog applications strip out non-standard characters or express encoded characters literally. As a test I will use the two normal methods of composing the em dash in html: — and —. I can’t be sure if either of these will work. I’ll just have to wait until the post is live.

    As you say though, there is no space preceding or succeeding it.

    I would refer others to Elements of Style as usage is clearly laid out by Srunk. Guy Kawasaki’s (the VC and blogger) High School English teacher wrote a language manual and he has strict usage rules. This is a great resource but suffers from information architecture and usablity issues as a web site. Here is the link for the usage notes on Dashes: http://tinyurl.com/rg6mu . The link to the main site is here: http://www.iolani.honolulu.hi.us/Keables/KeablesGuide/Start/home.htm

    As always, all the best,

    Jay

  2. I guess it worked.

    On a related note. Why is it that blog editor applications omit the (em)dash (and the slightly shorter en-dash)? I do need it quite frequently as I tend to write conversationally and they are reflective of how I speak. We are given the strikeout and italics and some even give curly quotes.

    I guess I should take the question further. Why is the dash not on our keyboards? We are given the ^ (caret symbol) which sits above the six. How often do you use the caret. I say we exchange the caret with the dash!

  3. I think it has to do with the database. Some databases are not set up with charsets that allow for non-ASCII text (accented characters would be stripped out as well as those two dashes).

  4. Hi Kim.

    I have been looking recently into the use of the em dash. What I’ve found is space around the em dashes should only be used in order to give emphasis to the parenthetical expression, when the expression is not merely an interupption.

    In a CMS I’m working on, I’m thinking of replacing double hypens with the em dash and “/-” with the en dash. Either that or replace “–” with the en and “—” with the em dash. The first idea seems more appropriate because it is common usage for people to write “–” as representing an em dash.

  5. To clarify, I was meant using 2 hypens and 3 hypens respectively.

    Nice to see you using proper quotation character entities, though aren’t you replacing all instances of the apostrophe rather than only when they contain a quotation (indicated when surrounded only by spaces, line breaks and other punctuation)?

Comments are closed.