The Forbidden Dash

[Karen Brattain]

I adore em dashes. They are useful and beautiful. Imagine my surprise, then, when one author expressed a different view. This gentleman is a PhD and a fine writer. One day, I queried him about replacing a pair of commas with a pair of ems (to relieve what I considered a comma-heavy sentence).

He replied that dashes were acceptable; however, in school he had been taught not to use them because they are not "proper grammar." Furthermore, he did not permit his students to use dashes.

This made me think: em dashes do have a boldness to them, even a sort of brute force that might come off too strong in a formal document. Although I happen to think them appropriate in any form of writing, others may disagree.

I would love to hear more opinions about this. Was anyone else taught not to use em dashes? Do any authors out there refuse to use them? Have any editors encountered this situation before?

In the case in question, I reasoned that obeying the author's wishes outweighed the need to change commas to dashes. I let the sentence stand.

I'll close with some excerpts from The Chicago Manual of Style.

6.87 Versatility and frequency of use. The em dash, often simply called the dash, is the most commonly used and most versatile of the dashes.

6.88 Amplifying or explaining. An em dash or a pair of em dashes sets off an amplifying or explanatory element. (Commas, parentheses, or a colon may perform a similar function.)

6.90 Indicating sudden breaks. An em dash or a pair of em dashes may indicate a sudden break in thought or sentence structure or an interruption in dialogue.

[Cliff N. Hansen]

There are many things I learned about writing/typing in school that I'm now having to unlearn. For example, I was explicitly taught to put two spaces after periods or colons. However, I don't think em dashes ever came up once in my pre-graduate education. It's not that my teachers discouraged the use, but I think it's more they were unaware of this form of punctuation. It probably comes from the fact that there wasn't a key for it on our typewriters—why there's not would be an interesting story! Instead of em dashes, I was taught to use parenthetical remarks, comas, and footnotes. And yes, I do over-coma as a result.

Learning about em-dashes is like adding a new tool to my repertoire, a new brush to paint with. Comas are too subtle, just a tiny mark and a pause, but em-dashes—a deliberately exaggerated stroke of the pen!—pull you out of any sentence before putting you back in your earlier place.

The reason I like em-dashes is for the visual element. They look differently than other elements of punctuation. Periods and comas look like ink blots, brackets and slashes are mechanical. The em-dash is bold, yet stays minimalistic. It is like ballet. As far as I am concerned, the wider the em-dash the better. While they tend to be little more than horizontal lines (although some fonts do add their flourishes), they also take negative space into account above and below the dash. This added whiteness to the page adds a feeling of poetry to prose and I am all about that!

[Cliff N. Hansen]

A new thing I recently learned about dashes. Certain works, such as by Joyce and other authors, use long dashes to mark dialog. As it turns out, these aren't actually em-dashes, but another one called a horizontal bar. It is acceptable procedure to use an em-dash if your font doesn't contain a horizontal bar.

[Karen Brattain]

Thanks for your insights. I appreciate your remarks on ems as a visual element. I had never thought of this before, but it's true, ems contribute a refreshing simplicity and a healthful dose of white space to text.

I was first introduced to ems through a book on writing and grammar which I read after college. This book emphasized the difference between parentheses, commas, and em dashes. I was delighted by the subtle but tangible distinctions between the three.

[Karen Brattain]

How interesting! I had never heard of the horizontal bar before. In 6.93, Chicago says "Em dashes are occasionally used instead of quotation marks (mainly by French writers) to set off dialogue." That's about all I knew until now.

I wonder what fonts out there do have a horizontal bar (but sadly I don't have time to find out).