Regarding the Em Dash

Essays
January 4, 2018 | 1 book mentioned 29 6 min read

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Punctuation, largely invisible and insignificant for normal people, as it should be, is a highly personal matter for writers.  Periods, commas, colons, semi-colons:  in their use or non-use and in their order and placement, can represent elaboration, conjecture, doubt, finality.  And in aggregate, over the course of a text, the rhythms of punctuation advance an author’s worldview and personality as surely as any plot or theme.  Patterns of punctuation usage are the writerly equivalent of an athlete’s go-to moves, or a singer’s peculiar timbre and range—those little dots and squiggles, in a sense, encode your voice.  Anthony Powell’s colon (pardon the inadvertent image) is as signature as Kyrie Irving’s crossover or Rihanna’s throaty cry.

For me, there is no punctuation mark as versatile and appealing as the em dash.  I love the em dash in a way that is difficult to explain, which is, probably, the motivation of this essay.  And my love for it is emphasized by the fact that many writers never, or rarely, use it—even disdain it.  It is not, so to speak, an essential punctuation mark, the same way commas or periods are essential.  You can get along without it and most people do.  I don’t remember being taught to use it in elementary, middle, or high school English classes; I’m not even sure I was aware of it then, and I have no clear recollection of when or why I began to rely on it, yet it has become an indispensable component of my writing.

It might be useful to include an official definition of the em.  From The Punctuation Guide:  “The em dash is perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark.  Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons—in each case to slightly different effect.”  The “slightly different” part is, to me, the em dash’s appeal summarized.  It is the doppelgänger of the punctuation world, a talented mimic impersonating other punctuation, but not exactly, leaving space to shade meaning.  This space allows different authors to use the em dash in different ways, and so the em dash can be especially revealing of an author’s style, even their character.

coverThe maestro of the em dash—as he was with many things (and apologies here, it is difficult not to annoyingly play, or seem to play, on a punctuation’s usage while writing about it)—was probably Vladimir Nabokov.  The locus of Nabokov’s attention is usually at least half trained on the fictional document he’s producing, so em dashes often serve as a kind of in-text footnote.  But in a more general sense, he simply employs them as part of his exemplary stylistic machinery, using them as counterweights against commas, as parenthetical ballast and rhetorical cog.  In Lolita, Nabokov is engaged in creating a calibrated ironic voice that half-emulates speech while retaining its smooth literary surface, and em dashes enable a more precise pacing of words and thoughts from the sentence to paragraph level.  A representative passage chosen completely at random:

I launched upon an “Histoire abregee de la poesie anglaise” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties—and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest.

I found a job—teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil.

Notice how the use of em dashes here, not strictly prescribed by any pressing grammatical need (the first could be justly replaced with a comma, the second eliminated), are used to create an internal structure that bridges paragraphs.  The long sentence at the end of the first paragraph closes with a short clause set off by an em dash, and the short sentence at the beginning of the next starts with a shorter clause also enclosed by the em.  The chief effect of this kind of bracketing is, I think, intuitive and rhythmical, adding to Humbert’s pompous purr, but there is a secondary effect of conjoining the ideas of transgression (his arrest) and seeming normalcy (finding a job), a pas de deux central to Lolita’s thematic heart.

A more contemporary user of the em dash is Donald Antrim.  Antrim’s em dash helps to create a faltering narration that expresses the pervasive emotional mood of his work, an almost paralytic anxiety.  Take this first sentence, from the story “Ever Since:”

Ever since his wife had left him—but she wasn’t his wife, was she? he’d only thought of her that way, had begun to think of her that way, since her abrupt departure, the year before, with Richard Bishop—Jonathan had taken up a new side of his personality and become the sort of lurking man who, say, at work or at a party, mainly hovers on the outskirts of other people’s conversations, leaning close but not too close…

The narrator has only just begun to have a thought about Jonathan’s wife before a new thought intrudes, needlessly clarifying who she is to him before we even know who he is.  “Needlessly” in story terms, though the larger narrative need is to exemplify, through halting syntax, Jonathan’s excruciatingly circumspect mental process.  This is, to a degree, Antrim’s own process, and we get doses of it even in more remote, comic narration, such as in the long beginning sentence—Antrim is a great lover of long beginning sentences—of “An Actor Prepares:”

Lee Strasberg, a founder of the Group Theatre and the great teacher of the American Method, famously advised his students never to “use”—for generating tears, etc., in a dramatic scene—personal/historical material less than seven years in the personal/historical past; otherwise, the Emotion Memory (the death of a loved one or some like event in the actor’s life that can, when evoked through recall and substitution, hurl open the floodgates, as they say, right on cue, night after night, even during a long run)—this material, being too close, as it were, might overwhelm the artist and compromise the total control required to act the part or, more to the point, act it well; might, in fact, destabilize the play; if, for instance, at the moment in a scene when it becomes necessary for Nina or Gertrude or Macduff to wipe away tears and get on with life; if, at that moment, it becomes impossible for a wailing performer to pull it together; if, in other words, the performer remains trapped in affect long after the character has moved on to dinner or the battlefield—when this happens, then you can be sure that delirious theatrical mayhem will follow.

Here, Antrim actually violates, as he sometimes does, a basic rule of parenthetical em dash usage, that you can only use one set per sentence.  The violation of this stricture is unsettling and makes it difficult to keep up with meaning.  Which, in a sentence and story about artistic chaos and loss of control, is, of course, the point.

Emily Dickinson is probably the most well-known user of the dash, to such an extent that “em” might justly be taken as short for “Emily.”  She habitually ended lines with em dashes, sometimes to an obvious effect, sometimes not.  Here is her most famous stanza:

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

What are the dashes doing here?  On the one hand, since they don’t serve any obvious syntactical function, they can be read simply as a stylistic tic.  But they do create a feeling of hesitation that serves the poetry.  Without them, this stanza is a nicely crafted, clever piece of thinking about the inevitability and dignity of death.  With them, we feel Dickinson’s hand hovering over the page, considering her subject.  This lends a poignancy to the poem, a sense of the artist thinking through her subject, considering the terms of her own death.  Her use of the em dash obliquely posits writing as an elaborative act, and in many of her poems the em transforms what would otherwise be somewhat inert, though great, common meter into something alive to itself, process-oriented.

My own favorite use of the em dash is for elaboration, similar to the way many writers use colons.  As a personal rule, I only use colons in a specific context:  that is, if what follows answers the question what?  Em dashes, I find useful for both narrowing and expanding a train of thought that might lose momentum in a new sentence—in this sense, they also stand in for the semicolon, but semicolons are best used (in my fuddled cosmology of punctuation) as dividing walls between two related but independent thoughts of approximate equal value (I wholly reject, by the way, that old bullshit about eliminating semicolons).

In truth, I probably overuse the em, find too much pleasure in asides, in explanation.  But I can’t do it, I cannot write terse little impregnable Tobias Wolffian sentences that stand on their own.  Though I can admire a page of these sentences—the calm presiding rationality, like civilized people queueing to exit the building in a fire drill—I am drawn instinctively to the dithering em, some contingency always butting up, worrying the previous sentence before it’s had a chance to end.  As Noreen Malone put it in a self-deprecating Slate article, “The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing.  It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence.”

This is true.  But is efficiency the point or purpose of writing?  It seems to me that novels, especially, are almost anti-efficiency devices.  Yes, we want to communicate clearly, but sometimes, just as crucially, we also want to clearly communicate the difficulty of communicating clearly.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

is a staff writer for The Millions and the author of two novels: The Grand Tour (Doubleday 2016) and The Hotel Neversink (2019 Tin House Books). His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, VICE, The Iowa Review, and many other places. His podcast, Fan’s Notes, is an ongoing discussion about books and basketball. Find him online at adamofallonprice.com and on Twitter at @AdamOPrice.

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Essays

Alone Together: At Book Riot Live

Essays
November 20, 2015 | 1 book mentioned 6 min read

Early in The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, Laura Miller talks about what it feels like to fall in love with a book — and to want to keep it all to yourself. “Discovering Narnia felt like a breathtaking expansion of the boundaries of my world,” she writes, “yet it was also an intensely private event.” Throughout her bibliomemoir, Miller talks to dozens of other Narnia lovers, including Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, and Jonathan Franzen. But perhaps more importantly, she talks to the teacher who introduced her to C.S. Lewis’s fantasy series. “You were so excited you couldn’t talk about it. I tried, but you sort of clammed up,” Wilanne Belden tells her. “I knew how important it was to you, but I think you thought that if you talked about it, it would get away.”

Among all the people she interviewed for The Magician’s Book, Miller describes the few friends who remembered an eagerness to discuss and share Narnia — or Middle Earth — as exceptions to the rule. Most people described childhoods in which they selfishly guarded their most beloved books, the memories of falling into fictional worlds wrapped up with memories of deep solitude. It’s a sentiment I’ve been encountering with some regularity recently, talking to friends and colleagues and a number of authors, notably ones who write books for younger readers — people who arguably have a more acute recollection of the formative power of books at that age.

When I cast back to my own childhood, I don’t remember a burning desire to share the books I loved with other people — but I don’t remember worrying that the magic would slip away if I tried to share any of that, either. I had no trouble tumbling head-first into fictional worlds, and I would linger there, writing the sort of un-networked fanfiction that lots of children dabble in. In adolescence, I came online, and saw that millions of other people were eager to talk about books they loved (and to write networked fanfiction, the kind that I study and write about, that’s meant to be shared, texts talking to texts). I lurked for years, sitting in a paradoxical place where I felt like I was a part of an enormous conversation about my favorite books — but I never said a word.

Is reading an inherently solitary experience? For many of us, our earliest encounters with books probably weren’t solitary at all: if we were lucky, adults read to us until we were skilled enough to take matters into our own hands. If late childhood is the time of unfettered solitary reading, it’s in adolescence when we learn to read together again, critically now, in classrooms as well as outside them. If we keep reading into adulthood, our habits are mostly dictated by preference: if we choose to share the experience of a good book, it’s with a friend or two, or a book club, or 1,000 other people in an online community. Sometimes it’s the book itself that dictates how much or little to share; more often, it’s a reader’s inclination. And sometimes readers are like my paradoxical lurking self: they want to experience something very private together.

In my capacity as a fandom journalist, I’ve spent the past few years attending fan conventions of various shapes and sizes, from the bombast of San Diego Comic-Con to the organic inclusiveness of NineWorlds in London. But I love books more than most of the pop culture on display at these cons, so I prefer gatherings that have books at the heart, from YALC at London Film and Comic-Con to Book Expo America’s consumer-facing BookCon to GeekyCon, which began years back as LeakyCon, named after the Harry Potter fan hub “The Leaky Cauldron.” These events are usually a mix of author panels and signings, and the publishers come out — with books to sell — in full force. But there’s something notable about the crowds at these bookish conventions, and it’s something I’ve puzzled over: they’re mostly young, mostly female, and while you spot plenty of groups geeking out over books, you see a fair number of readers on their own — actively reading. Tucked up in the corners of convention centers, these cons are full of people skipping out on all the programming to read, a curious sort of collective solitude on display.

Last weekend I trekked to the far, far west side of Manhattan to attend the inaugural Book Riot Live. It was the first major event for Riot New Media, the group that owns the popular bookish site Book Riot, and it brought in about 50 speakers, two dozen vendors, and more than 1,100 guests over the course of the weekend. “Book Riot Live came out of our desire to get the community together in real life,” Riot New Media’s events and programming director, Jenn Northington, told me. “Making sure that [it] reflected and celebrated our community was our number one concern. It influenced everything — programming, the layout, the vendors we invited, everything…What are they interested in, which authors have we seen people get the most excited about, what topics have created the most dynamic conversations.”

It was a weekend characterized by dynamic conversations: on the various stages, there were live podcast recordings, panels on bookish topics ranging from specific craft-related challenges to issues of inclusion and diversity in publishing at large, and authors like Margaret Atwood and Laurie Halse Anderson to get the crowds riled up (they were talking about sexism and censorship, respectively). Thankfully for me, it had a far more fannish feel than, say, the programming at BEA, where panelists (in my experience, at least) often seem like they’re confused by things they’re observing rather than speaking with authority about book fandom. These panels were populated by actual fans of books — and that was reflected pretty visibly in the audience, too.

But one of the most interesting things at Book Riot Live was up front, near a set of floor to ceiling windows that offered up a great view of the tourists approaching the Intrepid, moored in the Hudson. There were a few large, circular tables, and beside them, a circle of little beanbag armchairs, all occupied by people reading silently — people sitting alone together. “I can’t remember exactly when we had this idea, but it was part of the planning from very early on!” Northington told me when I asked her about it. “I cannot tell you how many times at other conferences and conventions I’ve heard people say ‘I wish there was a Quiet Room’ or ‘I wish there was somewhere I could just go and sit and look at all these books I now have.’ We definitely all wish for that on staff! So it was a no-brainer to set up a space for it.”

Whenever I took a seat in the quiet area, at a table or squashed down on one of the beanbags, I was struck by what a thoughtful space it was. If you took out a book in any random public space, you’d have to work to block out the rest of the world. (When I forget my noise-cancelling headphones, I often feel like I’m doing battle with the rest of the world when I’m trying to read or write — especially if the book’s a drag.) At Book Riot Live, that exchange was seamless, and silently negotiated: people seemed to sense exactly who wanted to strike up a conversation with another book-loving stranger — and who just wanted to be alone with a book they loved.

Northington and her colleagues seem to have a deep understanding of the duality at play here. “We are all big-mouths about books, all the time,” she told me. “Book Riot as a site came out of the litblogger community and was originally conceived as a blogger collective, and that’s a self-selecting group. You don’t start a blog unless you’re dying to talk with other people about what you’re reading. But I can completely understand folks who just want to sit with the work. There are stories that become so intensely personal that talking about them in public can make you feel mentally naked, and very vulnerable. There have certainly been times I’ve had to process my reaction to a book for a while before I could talk to anyone about it.”

When I write about book fandom, especially for an audience that’s less broadly fannish and more broadly bookish, I often sense a tension from people who can’t imagine reading being a communal experience. For them, it isn’t. I see that same tension with every book start-up that emerges and eventually folds: so many of them have aimed to socially network the reading experiences of the types of readers who just want to be left alone with their books. What a lot of these attempts fail to acknowledge is the people who want to read communally don’t need a new app to do it. If you want to talk about books with other people, you’ll find your spaces online, ones where you get to dictate how — and how much — you share what you’re reading.

These spaces are plentiful in the digital world; perhaps in the future, they’ll be just as easy to find in the analog world as well. If digital technologies have made our private spaces more public, maybe we need more squashy beanbags to make our public spaces a little more private. Maybe we’ll regularly be able to say, “I’m going to go out — and curl up with a good book.”

Image Credit: Flickr/Erin Kelly.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 6 min read
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Orwell and the Tea Party

Essays Notable Articles
July 26, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 40 6 min read

George Orwell never thought that his work would outlive him by much. After all, he considered himself “a sort of pamphleteer” rather than a genuine novelist, and confidently predicted that readers would lose interest in his books “after a year or two.” Yet sixty years later, Orwell endures, and I am not sure that this is a good thing.

I say this as someone who not only reads Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four once a year, but who also owns collections of essays, biographies, and even a copy of Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying, which according to one reviewer “at times mak[es] the reader feel he is sitting in a dentist’s chair.”

But for people like me who are under 30, there will always be something remote and incomprehensible about Orwell. I was in preschool when the Berlin Wall fell, and I know perestroika and détente as answers to exam questions rather than lived experiences. I grew up fearing nuclear power plants more than ICBMs, and found LBJ’s infamous “Daisy Girl” ad far less terrifying than some of the spots from the 2008 presidential election. I think of politics in terms of individual issues and partisan planks rather than grand, historicizing political ideologies. In short, because my worldview is so different from that of Orwell and his Cold War-era readers, I have to “think” my way into their political struggles in a way that someone even twenty years ago probably did not.

In ninth grade, I was required to read Animal Farm. My class read the book over a period of three weeks, which was not that hard of a task, since it is all of 30,000 words. Our teacher gave us the barest outline of historical context, enough at least to know that Napoleon represented Stalin, Snowball represented Trotsky, and that was about it (a whole unit on allegory would have to wait until sophomore year, and Billy Budd). But because the book is a “fairy story,” I learned its themes easily: power corrupts, principles are elastic, revolutions will be betrayed, and evil’s greatest allies are the unthinking masses.

Two years later, I found myself following Winston Smith into the cabbage-smelling hallways of Victory Mansions on a bright cold day in April. This was the year of “relatable” protagonists, so after Ralph from Lord of the Flies and Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, I was primed to look for affirmations of my own worldview. And Nineteen Eighty-Four was both cynical, anti-authoritarian, and a paean to hopeless dissent in the face of inexorable conformity (its working title, after all, was “The Last Man in Europe”). To my teenage mind, Winston was both pathetic and sympathetic – a role model – even if Big Brother got him in the end. Surely, I thought, these were the only lessons that were worth keeping from the book, since nothing else was obvious.

If there is such a thing as a “right way” and a “wrong way” to read books, then my high school approach to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been the latter. But that was because I did not know exactly how these books were shaped by their times, and how contemporary audiences would have reacted to them. We never heard about Orwell’s influences, such as Arthur Koestler, Yevgeny Zamyatin, or James Burnham, because they are not part of the literary canon. We never learned about the show trials in Moscow or the Spanish Civil War, either, because that was meant for history class, not English. And any textual analysis that smacked too much of politics was strictly out of bounds: I did not, for instance, understand that the concept of “Ingsoc” was supposed to be a satire of Nazism, whereby fascism advanced under a socialist veneer, until much later. In short, I could not have known what Orwell intended his works to be, and so I understood them in the only way I knew how, as advice manuals for the American adolescent.

I’m not the only one who never quite “got” Orwell the first time around. Because few people who read Orwell’s novels in classrooms also learn about their context, most people misunderstand them, or at least half-remember them, in the same way. Sometimes, his name gets applied to topics that he never really thought about, such as the “Orwellian” investment philosophy of Goldman Sachs (at best, Orwell railed against the “sheer vulgar fatness of wealth” and the “worship of money” in general) and the “downright Orwellian” American Community Survey form for the 2010 Census (Orwell has nothing specific to say about government paperwork). Other times, this means that Orwell’s political enemies try to claim him for their own side. This is nothing new: in the 1950s and 60s, for example, Soviet publications like Kommunist and Izvestia argued that Nineteen Eighty-Four was actually a critique of American excesses and amorality, and in 1984, Norman Podhoretz famously tried to make Orwell into a pro-nuclear neoconservative hawk.

But even though Hitler and Stalin belong to the dustbin of history, people still manage to find shades of totalitarianism and organized lying – Orwell’s favorite targets – in more places than ever. During the summer of 2009, for instance, opponents of health care reform wielded Orwell’s name indiscriminately. Steven Yates, a philosophy Ph.D. and member of the John Birch Society, told us that “‘Obama-care’ would make George Orwell spin in his grave.” Bill Fleckenstein, an MSN Moneywatch columnist and hedge fund manager, also decried such an obviously “socialist” project: “For those who aren’t clear on why socialism doesn’t work, I recommend reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”3 And Tea Party protesters have carried signs reading STOP. YOU’RE STARTING TO SCARE GEORGE ORWELL, ORWELL WARNED US, or ORWELL WAS A VISIONARY. Never mind that, in “How the Poor Die,” Orwell criticized how the indigent had inadequate access to health care; never mind that, in The Road to Wigan Pier, he blamed inadequate government intervention for poor nutrition and squalid living conditions in northern mining towns. Never mind that, for most of his life, Orwell advocated nothing short of a socialist revolution in England! As far as these people were concerned, Orwell’s works amount to nothing more than an anti-government, anti-change screed.

Overuse on the one hand, distortion on the other: what perversely fitting tributes to a writer who underscored the dangers of reductionism, revisionism, and willful ignorance. Clearly, George Orwell is a victim of his own success, and in a peculiar way – there are no public fights over the legacy of Hemingway or Joyce or even over other midcentury political writers like Hannah Arendt that rival the ones for Orwell’s posthumous stamp of approval.

So Orwell was right to consider himself more pamphleteer than novelist. Many critics have dismissed this as a kind of false modesty, but in this case, Orwell was not merely managing expectations. Pamphlets are designed to make a specific point to a specific audience, and then to be thrown away because they can no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended. Orwell’s works are ephemeral too, in the sense that they cannot really be understood without some semblance of historical and intellectual context. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of reading, and a lot of extracurricular effort to do so, however. Obviously, many readers simply find it easier to shout down any opposite political position with Orwell’s own words – Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others – than to really understand what these words, in context, were supposed to represent.

And Orwell was wrong to believe that good writing alone could promote honesty. He wrote that euphemistic, dishonest, and generally bad prose “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” whereas “good prose is like a windowpane,” through which the author’s purpose can be seen clearly. All true. But good writing can still be perverted, as many of his readers have shown and continue to show. As Louis Menand observed in The New Yorker, “Orwell’s prose was so effective that it seduced many readers into imagining, mistakenly, that he was saying what they wanted him to say, and what they themselves thought.” His style, in other words, has overwhelmed his substance, and if he had not been such a good, clear, memorable writer, he would not be plagued by grave-robbers.

Clearly, literary immortality has its downsides. And as the last sixty years have shown, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are not like other canonical works of literature such as To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby, whose messages are straightforward in comparison. Instead, they are as much pamphlet as novel, which means that it is impossible to understand his political purpose without knowing the intellectual and ideological environment in which he wrote. Until Orwell’s readers bother to do so – which, as a rule, they don’t – then we can look forward to another sixty years of use and abuse.

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29 comments:

  1. Bravo. Though we may differ in our use of such devices, you’ve captured my approach to punctuation precisely. Over time, I’ve pared down my use of any punctuation that may be technically required but not absolutely necessary to guide the reader. At the same time, I’m fond of the em dash, the semi-colon, and the ellipsis for communicating pace, dramatic emphasis, and things like hesitation or uncertainty. I’ve had heated arguments with peers about this practice—the chief objection being that readers, particularly so-called modern readers, don’t know what the punctuation means, that it gets in their way. My position: readers incapable of or unwilling to learn such notation of language are probably going to miss other qualities in my prose. They are not my readers.

  2. Oh my God! I am also a huge fan of the “dithering”—such an accurate characterization!—em dash.

    My TA hates this, of course—a common criticism of his in my essays is my (neurotic?) tendency to be “interventionist”—but eff him!

  3. Also, can this be a series? If you couldn’t tell, I definitely enjoyed geeking out over this.

  4. Damascus,

    Glad you enjoyed it. I don’t know about a series, but I may write something about the unjustly persecuted semicolon!

  7. I don’t think it disrupts flow; although I do miss the semi-colon. Having said that: what is with the Rhianna reference? That does not compute (haha).

  8. One of my favorite discoveries about Word–when I began using it years ago–was that it would automatically substitute an em-dash for a double en-dash. (This comment editor apparently does not.)

  11. I am heartened that there is another writer entranced by the em dash. O’Fallon Price, I applaud your fascination and explanation for it. I personally overuse the mark—it’s easy to do—it creates a pause as if the writer is speaking—as if one is looking for a right word—it is a way to temper a fragile thought.

    Now, take on the en dash. Try to raise it from the dead.

  12. How do you like your em-dash? Set tight (closed)—like this—or set loose (open) — like this — (with spaces) or as a double dash “––” for an extra push, or replacing it with a single loose en-dash ” – ” …all subject to whatever the typeface offers (not all match the “M”).

    I see the author (Adam) and commenters have chosen tight-set. I’m not judging, just observing, and curious about variations in the wild. Whether by feel, font, craft, or unexamined tradition—the preference is underscored by changes in technology, eg. 1780 vs 1890 vs 1950 vs 2007.

    Here’s what I found: A 1979 imprint of J.K. Jerome’s ‘Three men in a Boat’ uses a loose-set en-dash, as does a 1980 imprint of P.G. Woodhouse’s ‘Pigs Have Wings’ and a 2000 imprint of John Wyndham’s ‘The Chrysalids’ … all Penguin imprints. An 1890 imprint of Robert Burns verse uses tight-set long dash (double em? custom dash?), as does a 2015 imprint of Neil Stephenson’s ‘Seveneves’, while the 2013 Orbit imprints of Iian Banks’ ‘Consider Phlebas’, ‘Excession’, etc., follow the Penguin style guide with a loose-set en-dash.

    Oh, and I see Erik Spiekerman’s ‘Stop Stealing Sheep’ is set in loose en-dash — is this a trademark move on his part (because he definitely typeset it), or a style he was projecting for that specific work?

    Most of the other paperbacks I thumbed through are tight-set and full length … most exceed the width of their respective M’s. (And look at all those ellipsis…!)

    I will also add online fonts present new issues; Gizmodo.com for example confuses longer than usual hyphens with shorter than usual tight set em-dashes…hard to tell sometimes if two words are hyphenated or two clauses are being held apart. Just saying.

    FYI: American Press (AP) style guide recommends setting em-dashes open with spaces, as does Canadian Press and UK Guardian, while The Chicago Style Guide and others say the exact opposite.

    Fun with em-dashes — sorry if TLDR;

  13. Thank you very much — I had thought that I was alone in my admiration of em dash as such a friendly mark. Before about 1900, the em dash was usually surrounded by en spaces. That makes it yet more beautiful on the page.

  14. Edgar A. Poe has— if my memory serves me well— a wonderful mini-essay in his collected Marginalia on the value of the dash; I used to describe it as trhe zoom lens of punctuation.

  15. Adam, since I happen to agree with your every word here, I would definitely read a similar piece on the semicolon. If you do indeed write such a post, could you include a section on whether to hyphenate the world semicolon itself?

    You largely use it as a closed compound, which I happen to prefer, although you do hyphenate it early on. But in general I’m puzzled by the sheer number of people who hyphenate it regularly when I can find little justification in any of the major dictionaries or style manuals (with Merriam-Webster, various Oxfords, The Chicago Manual of Style, all favouring the closed version and only Wikipedia allowing for both)! I’m especially curious about this, given the modern dictionary’s claim to be more descriptivist than prescriptivist.

  16. Wonderful. Frankly I have used the dash for many many years but only at this reading have I learned it`s name–and yes, having it named after Em(ily) Dickinson is a gleaming idea which delights me. Cheers.

  18. @Mark Suggitt: Hey there, fellow! Enjoyed your observations! Maybe The Millions ought to solicit your services???

  19. True confession time –
    I love the em dash! I also use it more often than I should – but I don’t care! I also use the tilde in a completely inappropriate manner – as a prettier version of the em dash. I may as well just admit that I also use {braces} as spiffed up versions of parentheses.
    Now if I could just find a way to incorporate more schwas into my life, all would be perfect!

  20. Very nice essay on one of the less-understood punctuation marks—the em dash.

    As a professional typographer and book designer, I encountered the various dashes and dash-like characters early in my career. I realized that nowhere in my prior education had I ever seen or heard any explanation of the nuances of these various markings. (Though later in my career I was involved in such discussions!) Of course, back in the days when I learned to type (on a manual typewriter) we only had the hyphen — and two were used (as here) to act as a em dash. (There was no concept of an en dash.)

    Another commenter wonders about the open vs. closed (extra space or not between the ends of the dash) em dash. In part, this is a matter of how the typeface designer has created the em dash that accompanies the typeface. They vary in length and they vary in the side bearings allowed (and some are considerably longer than the em space as it is generally calculated). In addition, while I personally prefer close em dashes—I have had clients who couldn’t stand them and insisted in additional space before and after the em dash. This was usually accomplished by adding a “thin space” before and after the em dash itself—but sometimes, if the em dash in the face being used was one fo the extra long ones, I’d just use an em dash from a face with a shorter one—thank goodness for search and replace.

  21. How wonderful—an essay about one of my favourite punctuation marks! Thank you.

    I must admit I am a little confused about when to use an en dash and when to use an em dash.

    Either way, I like to include a thin space either side of them — a purely visual preference. Is this wrong? I’m in The Antipodes and hear the rules may be different than in The States.

    Love to hear your thoughts!

    p.s. Might I thank the hard-working hyphen for all its tireless labour, but I *do* wish the common folk would realise that it falls short (pun intended) when used in place of a nice, long, leggy dash.

  23. Do you distinguish between the em dash and its little brother, the en dash (which is half its length)? I find the en to be less jarring, and so makes for more readable prose. Your mileage may vary, of course.

    As for the semicolon, George Orwell (no mean prose stylist) believed that it was unnecessary, and never used it. While I don’t agree, I do find that I use it too often in situations where a comma or period would set the breath-mark of the prose more accurately.

  24. Rachel + Nemo,

    AFAIK the em is preferred to the en for the purpose of prose writing. I don’t believe they’re interchangeable–the en usually being used for scores, date ranges, etc. I believe no spaces is also preferred by copy editors, but then you’re talking someone who double spaces after periods, so what do I know?

  25. Thank you. I love the em dash — with the proviso that for the digital age we need a new em dash typography. With “[space] em-dash [space]” everything from HTML to .mobi will have readable line breaks. Use “[space] em-dash [space]” please?

  26. The two correct way to write this dash is to a) just write an em dash or b) write en dash with spaces before and after. Most editors prefer the version “a)”. I would like to explain why I am a devoted fan of version “b)”. When one looks at the version “a)” within a block of space—it becomes one of the most distinctive visual signs. It is a strong visual rupture in the rhythm of letters. It has a very long horizontal bar that unapologetically breaks this rhythm. It becomes visually more important than, what should structurally be above it in the hierarchy of information—the marking of the end of a sentence – a dot, space and a first large letter of next sentence. I feel that version “b)” – en dash with two accompanying spaces – looks a bit softer, blends a bit better with surroundings and simply visually belongs to the block of text more.

  27. Ahhh just wonderful. I love the idea of the em dash being named after Emily Dickinson because of her annoying excessive use of the thing. I was fortunate (or maybe not, because no one is as particular as they used to be and it drives me nuts) to have my start straight out of high school as a typesetter back in the day when typesetting was an art. One of our clients was McGraw-Hill, and I would set type for mathematical textbooks, including very long equations. They were extremely particular about spacing around dashes and between certain characters…there were thin spaces, en spaces, em spaces, and even a hair space. After awhile you could tell at a glance which had been used, and whether or not it was correct. And in paragraph copy, you were expected to know what that particular customer’s preference for spacing around en and em dashes should be. All dependent on the font and the customer, but all had to be consistent. No wonder my eyesight is horrible. Thanks for this trip down amnesia lane.

  28. As a huge lover of punctuation in general —I once named a cat Apostrophe — and the em dash in particular, I thank you for this article. My own sense of the em dash is that it can make way for a slightly less linear narrative, and more accurately convey the way that some people think. I recall hearing about some research which identified that the em dash has been noted more frequently in writing by females, however cannot, alas, cite the source. Cheers, Erin

  29. I, too, have an affinity for the em dash. It was a punctuation mark my highschool english teacher actually insisted I practice using – as I had a terrible habit of writing run-on sentences with numerous commas. Your article on semi-colons brought me here, and I enjoyed both pieces of writing. Cheers!

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Essays

Willie Dee

Essays
March 29, 2018 | 1 book mentioned 1 5 min read
After a harrowing 18 months being rejected time after time by a succession of 13 agents, I found an agent who believed in my novel, and then a publisher, Warner Books, which decided to make the title its lead book for spring 2001.
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 1 5 min read
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