{"id":9620,"date":"2011-06-02T09:39:51","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T13:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9620"},"modified":"2011-06-02T09:39:51","modified_gmt":"2011-06-02T13:39:51","slug":"pity-the-poor-over-used-em-dash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/06\/02\/pity-the-poor-over-used-em-dash\/","title":{"rendered":"Pity the poor, over-used em-dash"},"content":{"rendered":"

Noreen Malone<\/a> — who admits to being an em-dash abuser herself — makes an appeal for everyone to just leave the em-dash alone!<\/p>\n

\n

According to the Associated Press Stylebook<\/em> — Slate<\/strong><\/em>‘s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related — there are two main prose uses— the abrupt change and the series within a phrase — for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon — and yet in practical usage, we do. A lot — or so I have observed lately. America’s finest prose — in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels — is littered with so many dashes among the dots it’s as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code.<\/p>\n

What’s the matter with an em dash or two, you ask? — or so I like to imagine. What’s not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options — sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment — in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn’t a dash — if done right — let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?<\/p>\n

Nope — or that’s my take, anyway. Now, I’m the first to admit — before you Google and shame me with a thousand examples in the comments — that I’m no saint when it comes to the em dash. I never met a sentence I didn’t want to make just a bit longer — and so the dash is my embarrassing best friend. When the New York Times<\/em>‘ associate managing editor for standards — Philip B. Corbett, for the record — wrote a blog post scolding Times<\/em> writers for overusing the dash (as many as five dashes snuck their way into a single 3.5-paragraph story on A1, to his horror), an old friend from my college newspaper emailed it to me. “Reminded me of our battles over long dashes,” he wrote — and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t on the anti-dash side back then. But as I’ve read and written more in the ensuing years, my reliance on the dash has come to feel like a pack-a-day cigarette habit — I know it makes me look and sound and feel terrible — and so I’m trying to quit. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bloggers (some of us, anyway) tend to use the em-dash a bit too frequently, and that’s one of the downsides to being one-person shows — there’s no kindly editor to strike through the excess punctuation with a red pen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Noreen Malone — who admits to being an em-dash abuser herself — makes an appeal for everyone to just leave the em-dash alone! According to the Associated Press Stylebook — Slate‘s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related — there are two main prose uses— the abrupt change and the series within a phrase — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,73],"tags":[204,400,213,462,134],"class_list":["post-9620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-randomness","tag-blogging","tag-language","tag-newspapers","tag-typography","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2va","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9621,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9620\/revisions\/9621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}