Tip: On a Mac, you can type an em-dash with shift-option-hyphen. (An en-dash is just option-hyphen.)
There are a few reasons why I switched from PC to Mac, but there's only one reason I'll never switch back—it's this em-dash shortcut.
Regarding the Em Dash
11–20 of 219 posts
Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#12Maybe I'm weirdly old fashioned, but I try to stick to ascii whenever possible - which means whatever character is stuck in the middle of this sentence. Ditto for the ellipsis, since it's not like three trailing periods at the end of a sentence can be mistaken for anything else...
Why? Unicode is (nearly) everywhere these days and offers so much more expressiveness, why stick to ASCII?
Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#13As someone who takes flak from literati friends for his em dashin', this is a vindicating find—(!)thanks, OP.
I learned to use em dashes in the military on our performance reports (sort of like an annual resume with a grade attached).
For a few (dubious) reasons, every bullet had to be precisely 1 line long, +/- 0-3 spaces at EOL (we had almost as many rules regarding these bullets as we did the other kind, it seemed).
Since we had a lot of (usually somewhat independent) points to jam into 1 line, we often had lots of separate clauses with a period, semi-colon[1], or em dash. The em dash always seemed to fill precisely the correct amount of space.
Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#14Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#15Am I the only curmudgeon who can’t get past the extra space after periods in a post about punctuation?
Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#16Am I the only curmudgeon who can’t get past the extra space after periods in a post about punctuation?
Nope. Raging against double-spaces post-period was all the rage a few years back[1], so I'm sure it raises quite a few curmudgeonly hackles.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...
Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#17Maybe I'm weirdly old fashioned, but I try to stick to ascii whenever possible - which means whatever character is stuck in the middle of this sentence. Ditto for the ellipsis, since it's not like three trailing periods at the end of a sentence can be mistaken for anything else...
This is a great example of how limiting ASCII is. It doesn’t even contain the full set of punctuation that correct (!) English requires. It supposes that you are satisfied using ' for both ‘ and ’, and " for both “ and ”, and eliminates all the dashes for the hyphen—which has to play double duty as a minus sign.
It also eliminate dieresis from the language, naive not naïve, and strips all accents from loan words
Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#18Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#19Tip: On a Mac, you can type an em-dash with shift-option-hyphen. (An en-dash is just option-hyphen.)
Thanks, I have been looking for that. But it's command-hyphen for en-dash, and shift-command-hyphen for em-dash on my Mac.
Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#20The em dash is the most beautiful punctuation mark, all the more because it is rare --- and it is best kept that way. Certainly a sentence with more than two is imparsible. In fact, more than a few in a whole article is probably getting annoying. It's like the exclamation point in that way.
Once you discover the em dash, it is hard to restrain yourself. But I'm trying to come back to the comma. It does its work without fanfare, almost invisibly. The mature writer realizes his job is to tell the reader something without getting in the way.
I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash. Unconventionally, I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens. The traditional two aren't long enough. But two is better than one. I always have to reread sentences by someone who thinks the hyphen and the dash are the same thing.