Last night I went through all my blog posts and replaced hyphens—which are the default dash in so many applications—with my beloved em-dash. The hyphens have been tormenting me since I started writing blogthecat entries, but I wasn’t sure how to change them. A quick hunt for HTML codes yesterday ended my misery, and I can’t tell you how merry—delirious, even—I was as I pasted the long, elegant line over each ill-placed and unsatisfying hyphen.
The em-dash is one of my favourite punctuation marks. I try not to be its slave, since it can certainly be overused, and anything overused is ugly and distracting. Employed sparingly, however, and to proper effect, it can dramatically punch up a piece of writing. It can also add to the sense that the author is speaking her writing right to you. I think there are two reasons for this:
1. Em-dashes can be used to begin and end an interruption or aside in a sentence. Consequently, em-dash-fragmented sentences mirror how most of us actually think. We don’t think in one pure burst of linear thought most of the time. We make room for the odd tangent or revelation brought on by a previous thought. Consider the following along these lines:
“He refused to tell anyone—least of all his wife—about that embarrassing moment during the medical exam.”
Without that em-dashed clarification, the sentence would be less interesting. Even if the clarification were kept, but surrounded with commas instead of em-dashes (as it certainly could be), it would lose power:
“He refused to tell anyone, least of all his wife, about that embarrassing moment during the medical exam.”
2. The ineffectiveness of the comma substitution above attests to the second way the em-dash makes writing feel like it's being spoken: via its visual impact. It provides a nice, long break between thoughts, so the reader’s eye can have a little rest to get ready for the next piece of information. It provides rhythm, and an uneven one at that. Who among us speaks in perfectly spaced-out verbal bursts? When you listen to someone speak, often it’s their pauses, their hesitation, their lingering, etc., as much as what they’re actually saying that’s so compelling. The em-dash may be the best punctuation mark at approximating this unpredictability.
Of course, it’s hard to get away from conventional wisdom that we should always consider other marks (the comma, the semi-colon, and the period—for different reasons) before using the em-dash. I keep this in mind, and I do change the odd em-dash into another mark. But not often. And with a sigh.
No love for the tiny en-dash? 19722007?
Posted by: Travis | September 12, 2007 at 02:50 AM