Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

Dashes
56 assorted things to do (and not to do) with punctuation
The stuff in the front

50.

Dashes come in two flavors: em and en. Em dashes (which most people simply refer to as dashes) are so called because they were traditionally the width of a capital M in any particular typeface (nowadays they tend to be a touch wider); en dashes are the width of a lowercase n.

This is an em dash: —

This, just a touch shorter yet still longer than a hyphen, is an en dash: —

Likely you don’t need much advice from me on how to use em dashes, because you all seem to use an awful lot of them.

They’re useful for interruption of dialogue, either midsentence from within:

“Once upon a time—yes, I know you’ve heard this story before—there lived a princess named Snow White.”

or to convey interruption from without:

“The murderer,” she intoned, “is someone in this—”

A shot rang out.

And they nicely set off a bit of text in standard narration when commas—because that bit of text is rather on the parenthetical side, like this one, but you don’t want to use parentheses—won’t do the trick:

He packed his bag with all the things he thought he’d need for the weekend—an array of T-shirts, two pairs of socks per day, all the clean underwear he could locate—and made his way to the airport.

According to copyediting tradition—at least copyediting tradition as it was handed down to me—you should use no more than two em dashes in a single sentence, and I think that’s good advice—except when it’s not.

En dashes are the guild secret of copyediting, and most normal people neither use them nor much know what they are nor even know how to type them.^*17 I’m happy to reveal the secret.

An en dash is used to hold words together instead of your standard hyphen, which usually does the trick just fine, when you’re connecting a multiword proper noun to another multiword proper noun or to pretty much anything else. What the heck does that mean? It means this:

a Lana Condor—Noah Centineo romance

a New York—to—Chicago flight

a World War II—era plane

a Pulitzer Prize—winning play

Basically, that which you’re connecting needs a smidgen more connecting than can be accomplished with a hyphen.

Please note in the second example above that I’ve used two en dashes rather than an en dash and a hyphen, even though “Chicago” is a single word. Why? Visual balance, that’s all. This

a New York—to-Chicago flight

simply looks—to me and now, I hope, to you, forever afterward—lopsided.

I’ve also seen attempted, in an attempt to style the last example, the use of multiple hyphens, as in:

a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play

That simply doesn’t look very nice, does it.

You don’t want to make en dashes do too much heavy lifting, though. They work well visually, but they have their limits as far as meaning is concerned. The likes of

the ex—prime minister

certainly makes sense and follows the rules, but

the former prime minister

works just as well.

And something like

an anti—air pollution committee

would be better as

an anti-air-pollution committee

or perhaps should be rethought altogether.

En dashes are also used for

page references (pp. 3—21)

sporting game scores (the Yankees clobbered the Mets, 14—2)^*18

court decisions (the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling by a 7—2 vote)