dashing through the prose



Dashing Through the Prose

 

We live on the dash between our birth date and our death date.

― Jesse Jackson

 

Use hyphens and dashes correctly.

 

The great unwashed (including many scientists and engineers) use hyphens and dashes indiscriminately; however, each one has a purpose. There’s the hyphen, which is used to hyphenate words: “Get me another one of those git-dang Icelandic hotdogs!” There’s the en dash, which is longer than the hyphen and is used between numbers to mean “to” or “through”: “I’m so hungry I could eat 4–5 Icelandic hot dogs!” And then there’s the em dash, even longer, that is used to set apart clauses: “We went to Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur to eat hot dogs—they were dang good!”

Let’s see them all together:

                        hyphen:           -

                        en dash:          –

                        em dash:         —

Exciting stuff, right?

People and style guides differ on whether or not there should be spaces before and after hyphens and dashes. I, for one, prefer no spaces. Some style guides state that em dashes should not be used in formal writing, but I disagree. Sometimes you need an em dash for greater emphasis or to avoid confusion with the use of commas, semicolons, and colons in a sentence. 

 

copyright Robert E. Mace 2025 

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